Even as the Tamil Nadu government has positioned Chennai as one of India's future AI and data hubs and aligned itself with digital governance and police modernisation, the absence of a dedicated police website for the city has left citizens with little transparency, data availability or meaningful engagement.
Last month, the government launched a new version of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) which seeks to leverage technology to improve efficiency and accountability of services given to the public.
In complete contrast though, Chennai continues to be the only major Indian metropolis whose police force does not even have a website of its own. With a force of more than 20,000 cops, the Greater Chennai Police (GCP) is responsible for the safety of more than one crore people, in-charge of preventing and detecting crime, and managing its worsening traffic.
Though the GCP is governed separately, its details are subsumed in the state police website, which is conservative with information, provides bare minimum details and hides more than it reveals. For instance, unlike its counterparts in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Delhi, Kerala and West Bengal, copies of FIRs registered in Tamil Nadu are accessible to users only if they part with their mobile number.
Why Chennai police needs a website
India’s top metro cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and even Thiruvananthapuram, and Chandigarh have dedicated thriving websites for their police force. They host detailed information that is useful for citizens, basic performance statistics, and in some cases, special initiatives to build engagement with the public.
Most of these city police forces have a google-map locator of the nearest police station, a feature that multiple serving and retired IPS officers TNM spoke to, appreciated as being useful for citizens who need help from the cops.
Given the teething problems urban citizens face in their daily commute, these cities also have separate traffic police websites, with simple and effective messaging on rules, violations, details on missing and abandoned vehicles, accident analysis, etc.
In comparison, all Chennai has is separate X (formerly Twitter) handles for its police unit and traffic counterpart. A website existed, but went offline in 2008. Later in 2022, the Tamil Nadu Information Commission (TNIC) questioned why Greater Chennai Police did not have a separate website and asked the Public Information Officer (PIO) to create one and upload information on it. This was also a requirement for complying with Section 4 of the RTI Act, which mandates disclosure of information by government agencies, the TNIC said.
Public policy experts opined that in today’s digitised world, a good website with information, documents and data is not a luxury; it’s the foundation of modern transparency and civic trust, especially for a city positioning itself as a global hub.
AV Venugopal, public policy expert and programme manager at Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), Chennai, said that for a city that aspires to be globally important, a website is also the first point of contact for the world, which includes prospective investors, international delegations and visiting tourists.
“Unlike social media, which can be fragmented and informal, an official website offers verified, authoritative information that outsiders too can rely on for business decisions and travel planning. A neglected or inaccessible site signals that a city is not yet ready to engage on a local or global stage,” Venugopal said.
For instance, the Mumbai police website provides a list of abandoned vehicles across the city, a safety tip to avoid each subhead of crime and a monthly crime report. Its ‘Contact Us’ section provides photographs of every cop posted at a particular police station.
Similarly, the Delhi police has a separate web page on the various No Objection Certificates (NOCs) that citizens or businesses might require. It hosts a separate database on stolen vehicles, phones, and unidentified dead bodies. It also has a separate webpage for its unit handling crimes against women and children. Over and above, Delhi police runs a podcast highlighting important cases and a fortnightly legal journal.
The Bengaluru police website is rudimentary, but the one for traffic police has a dashboard on accident statistics. The Hyderabad police website has a separate web page for each crime which builds awareness; it has a Me Seva Services page which gives step-by-step instructions for citizen services. They also publish an annual report on their website.
While the Kolkata traffic police website publishes an accident dashboard, it also hosts reports of road safety committee meetings, an inter-agency forum which decides on important issues pertaining to citizens. Apart from a separate section on citizen services, the Howrah police website publishes important orders; the most recent one was on warning cyber cafes about their systems being used for cyber offences.
A serving IPS officer in Tamil Nadu said that transparency in public systems can weed out inefficiencies, but the state bureaucracy does not encourage such a culture. “The police system in TN is insular; transparency is not encouraged. Officers at all levels don’t want their work to be discussed, or engaged with, by the public. In comparison, the Delhi police for instance holds regular press briefings,” the officer said.
The official policy of the Tamil Nadu government, a senior police official from the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) which maintains the website said, is to have a centralised website for its state police. “We believe more in outcomes from action-oriented policing. There is no significant advantage in having a separate website for the city units,” the senior police officer said.
Accessing FIRs require user details
A 2016 Supreme Court verdict mandates that copies of all FIRs, barring those pertaining to sensitive offences like sexual crimes, insurgency, terrorism, child sexual abuse, etc should be uploaded on the police website. FIRs are public documents as they have to be submitted to a magistrate court immediately after a case is registered.
On the TN police website, FIRs can be accessed only after entering an OTP generated after the user keys in their mobile number.
In comparison, FIRs registered in states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, West Bengal and Kerala are available on their website without requiring registration, login or parting with your mobile number.
Even agencies like CBI and NIA, handling high-profile and sensitive cases, host most of their FIRs on their website which are available to the public for download.
Jayanth Murali, who retired as a DGP-rank officer from Tamil Nadu, said that FIRs should be made available to the public easily. “In the digital age, transparency is important and the police should embrace it,” he said.
The SCRB officer defended the move, explaining that it is carefully thought-out, based on evidence of FIRs being used by cyber criminals to scam gullible citizens. The officer said that there was evidence of CBI FIRs being used by cyber criminals to extort money from citizens. TN police wants to prevent that by ensuring that everybody who downloads the FIR gives their contact details, thereby maintaining accountability, the officer added.
Not everybody agrees with this reasoning. P Balaji, a Chennai-based advocate, said that access to FIRs will expose several cops at several police stations which file cases that are filled with bogus information or are filed just for the sake of showing numbers. He cited an informal study he had conducted in 2019 on what legal circles label ‘copy paste FIRs’. Balaji had downloaded hundreds of FIRs from across a few police stations in Chennai. He found that multiple FIRs from a particular police station had very similar language, the same scene of crime and the same section of IPC invoked for a crime of using foul language against a bystander. “Even the curse word used was identical in all FIRs,” he said.
Stonewalling access to FIRs also causes delays for lawyers who are trying to help the accused get bail in a case, Balaji added.
Balaji and two other serving IPS officers echoed Jayanth Murali, pointing out that the police need to become more people-friendly and one of the ways was to increase transparency. “For legitimacy, transparency is important. There should be reasonable public access in governance procedures,” a senior IPS officer said.
Siddharth Prabhakar is a freelance journalist based in Chennai with past stints in Times of India, The New Indian Express and Press Trust of India where he covered politics, central agencies, crime, investigations and others.