Mysore police develops software to track owners of unclaimed vehicles
BENGALURU: Mandya district police have set the model for the rest of the police in the State and country for tracking unclaimed stolen and lost vehicles, which have been seized by the police but have been lying in the police stations for want of owner details.
In the just concluded conference on ‘Smart Policing’ – a central government initiative for having a strict, sensitive, modern, mobile, alert, accountable, reliable, responsive, techno-savvy and trained police in Bengaluru, Superintendent of Police, Mandya, Bhushan G. Borase demonstrated the software through which the district police have been able to track the genuine owners of large number of stolen/lost vehicles and have given them back their vehicles. The model is likely to be replicated in the rest of State and country.
“There were around 1,800 unclaimed vehicles, which were lying in 30 police stations in Mandya district. We have been able to return 786 vehicles so far after identifying their owners using the software,” the SP told this newspaper. The software was developed by three students of Computer Engineering Department of PES Engineering College, Mandya, using data from three sources
“We used data of unclaimed vehicles in police stations, which include information such as registration, engine and chassis number, along with the make and model of the vehicle and matched it with the State wide data of stolen vehicles from the ‘Motor Vehicle Verification Counter’ from the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB and the data of all registered vehicles in the Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) from their website vahan.nic.in. The software used the data from the first two databases to track vehicles, which were stolen under a particular police station limit to the police station where they were lying unclaimed. For the vehicles for which the FIRs could not be traced we traced the owner with the help of website vahan.nic.in,” explained Mr. Borase.
It’s a known fact that FIRs are not always registered in all vehicle theft cases and that not all the recovered stolen vehicles are returned to the owners for lack of a foolproof mechanism.
Taking the project ahead, Mysore district police have developed an Android based application in which the stolen vehicle data of Karnataka is stored in a server. “Whenever an entry of any vehicle registration number, chassis number or engine number is made in this App, it checks in the server and reply is generated telling if the vehicle is stolen or not. This app is used by police officers of Mysore and Mandya district at present,” said Borase.
