New beginnings: Police scraps decade-old record management project

152 police officials trained in database management have been asked to move to a similar project started by the PITB

LAHORE:

The Punjab Police have removed its 152 officials from a record keeping and office management system started in 2005 with federal government support and asked them to report to a similar project initiated six months ago by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), The Express Tribune has learnt.

The decision was taken at a recent meeting held at Qila Gujjar Singh Police Lines. Investigations SSP Rana Ayyaz Saleem, who chaired the meeting, was not available for comment. Investigation DIG Sultan Ahmad said he had only recently taken charge of the office and had not attended the meeting.

Under the Police Record and Office Management System (PROMIS) project, the record of police stations across the province had to be automated and shared among them as well as with the offices of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Punjab, the Capital City Police Officer (CCPO) Lahore and the Operations and Investigations Deputy Inspector Generals of Police.



The objectives of the PROMIS mentioned on the Police Department website include use of information technology to enhance efficiency and effectiveness of the police force; automation of police station record including FIRs; designing of a management information system (MIS) to facilitate operations; provision of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for police covering issues pertaining to finance and budgeting, assets and accounts management, human resources, and payment and procurement; and provision of data sharing facilities within various police sub-departments.

An official present at the meeting said that automation and sharing of data had been delayed because funds to procure computers, batteries, fax machines and networking machines were not released on time. He did not specify the year when hardware was procured and operations started. However, he said despite procurement of hardware operations could not continue smoothly because the PITB did not regularly pay the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) for provision of networking services. He said regular payments were ensured only for some time and for 54 model police stations across the province.

Shaheen Khalid, additional director (computers) at the Police Department, who oversaw launch of the project, admitted that delay in release of funds had affected procurement of hardware for the project. Asked if the police department had shelved the project, she said she was not aware of such a development. Information Technology Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Shahid Haneef also expressed ignorance about the status of the project.

PITB  Information Technology Director General Faisal Yousaf dismissed the allegation that the PITB had been irregular in release of payments to the PTCL. He also denied that the board had not been interested in the project.

He said payments had been suspended six months ago after the PITB developed a new record management system for the Police Department on its own.

He said the PROMIS had been started as a stand-alone project. “The PITB had been working on other projects for the Police Department and wanted to integrate PROMIS with those projects,” he said. However, he said the company that had designed the PROMIS software was reluctant to share the source code with the PITB. “We sent several requests to them to share the source code. When we did not get the desired response, we decided to develop an automated information management system on our own,” he said.

He said like the PROMIS, the PITB system allowed development of databases for FIRs registered with police stations as well as for the 25 registers maintained at every police station of the province.

He said databases for 14 of the 25 registers of all police stations in the city had already been prepared and work was underway on the remaining registers as well as FIRs registered across the city.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 3^rd, 2015.