Over 500,000 offenders listed on India's first narcotics record site

12 Sept 2022 , 03:38 PM

India's register of drug traffickers, the National Integrated Database on Arrested Narco-offenders (Nidaan), has logged over 500,000 identities in the first month since its introduction, according to The Economic Times on Monday.

Nidaan is a first-of-its-kind database of arrested drug offenders from states and union territories that was created by the Narcotics Control Bureau. According to officials, Nidaan gets its data from the e-Prisons repository and the ICJS (inter-operable criminal justice system), and it will eventually be integrated with the crime and criminal tracking network system, or CCTNS.

ICJS, a project of the Supreme Court e-committee, was developed to facilitate data and information sharing among the various components of the criminal justice system, including courts, police, jails, and forensic science labs, from a single platform.

On July 30 in Chandigarh, during the national conference on "Drug trafficking and national security," Union Home Minister Amit Shah launched the narcotics coordination mechanism (NCORD) portal, which includes Nidaan. The union government established NCORD in 2016, a four-tier mechanism with NCB serving as the national nodal organization.

The database includes details on people who have been charged with drug crimes, detained, and imprisoned as well as those who are "directly or indirectly involved in the produce, manufacture, possession, selling, purchase, transport, warehousing, usage, consumption, inter-state import and export, import into India, export from India, or transshipment of any narcotics or psychotropic substance," according to PTI.

According to authorities, only state police and law enforcement organizations have access to the database for surveillance and investigative reasons. According to ET, Nidaan contains the names and aliases of the criminals, their travel and immigration papers, employment data, professional licenses, and other crucial identifying information.

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