Modi government plans online database of charge-sheeted sexual offenders

NEW DELHI: Suspect a person in your locality, your driver or domestic help, of being a sexual offender? By 2017, you could go to an online portal and search by the person’s name to find out if he is charged for a sexual crime.

The union home ministry is planning to have India’s own ‘ Sex Offenders Registry’, an online database of charge-sheeted sexual offenders nationwide, to be accessible to the public through a Citizen Portal in the upcoming Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project. The idea seems inspired from the US which has a similar National Sex Offender Public Website.

The UPA government, after the Nirbhaya case in 2013, toyed with such an idea of a nationwide ‘Sex Offenders Registry’ but the project didn’t take off. Few police units such as the Delhi Police though did start displaying photographs, names and addresses of convicted sex offenders on their website in 2013.

The Centre now plans to have a nation-wide ‘Sex Offenders Registry’ through the CCTNS project which is linking crime and criminal records online of all 20,000 police stations in the country.

All police stations will populate their respective state citizen portal which will link to the central Registry. “This would be a consolidated national registry of charge-sheeted offenders in cases specific to crime against women -- Sec 375 (rape), Sec 376 A, Sec 376 B and other sexual offences. The individual’s name will be removed from the list if acquitted,” a home ministry official told ET.

Names, photos, address and crime details of all offenders are expected to be put online.