PUNE, May 29: If criminals have gone high-tech, can the police be far behind? Effective use of available computer network and other telecommunication facilities are the highlights of a scheme prepared to deal with the rising cases of dacoities and robberies in Pune and neighbouring districts.

The special scheme, prepared at the meeting of senior officials from Pune rural, Satara, Thane City, Solapur city, Solapur rural and Pune Railway police forces, here recently is expected to curb the rising crime graph.

The meeting was convened by the Pune police force close on the heels of the directives by Minister of State for Home Gajanan Kirtikar to check the crime rate. During his Pune visit on May 5, Kirtikar had directed the police to adopt measures to deal with the recent spate of property-related crimes.

The close-door meeting, which started at the office of Pune's Police Commissioner around 11 am went on till 2 pm. The main thrust was on exchange of information pertaining to crimes and criminals. It was noticed that the near-total lack of latest information was one of the reasons behind the recent rise in crime.

In a bid to tackle the problem effectively, it was decided that the police force in each of these districts would preserve all available information about the criminals staying and operating under their jurisdiction on the computer network developed throughout the State specially for the use of police forces.

The use of computers is expected to speed up the process of establishing the identities of suspects in various crimes. Though the computer network has been installed at all the district police headquarters for the last five years, till now it was used mostly to store data pertaining to stolen vehicles.

Another important decision towards improving the coordination was to use telephone lines to tip off the police forces at various places about the crimes reported.

The police officials also exchanged the lists of history-sheeters active in their respective jurisdictions and decided to keep them on surveillance. The reports pertaining to their activities will be circulated among the police circles within a fortnight, it was decided.

Besides keeping all the history-sheeters on surveillance, all the police officials also agreed to launch a crack-down against the anti-social elements and to initiate preventive actions against the habitual criminals.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.