The Centre on Friday approved the Ministry of Home Affairs’ implementation of Phase II of the Inter-Operable Criminal Justice Management (ICJS) project for a total expenditure of Rs 3,375 crore from 2022-23 to 2025-26.

This phase, which will be strictly supervised by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, will pave the way for effective and modern policing.

According to an MHA statement, the project will be implemented as a central sector programme.

ICJS is a national platform that allows the integration of the country’s principal IT system for delivering criminal justice online. Police (via Crime and Criminal Tracking and Network Systems), e-Forensics for Forensic Labs, e-Courts for Courts, e-Prosecution for Public Prosecutors, and e-Prisons for Prisons are the five pillars of the criminal justice management system.

Individual IT systems have been built and stabilised in Phase I of the project, according to MHA, while record search has been enabled on these platforms.

‘Under Phase-II, the system is being created on the idea of ‘one data, one entry,’ where data is entered only once in one pillar and is subsequently available in all other pillars without the need for additional data entry, need to re-enter the data in each pillar,’ the MHA said in a statement.

The ICJS system, according to MHA, would be the greatest criminal justice programmes available through a dedicated and secure cloud-based infrastructure with high-speed connectivity.

In collaboration with the National Informatics Centre, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) will be in charge of the project’s implementation (NIC). The criminal justice management will be undertaken in partnership with the states and union territories,’ according to the MHA.