New Delhi: Around 12 companies, including TCS, Infosys and Wipro will bid for a $408 million online FIR project, which will involve devising a new automated complaint filing and tracking system that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) plans to roll out across India.

Vijay Kumar Singh hopes that by 2012, most of those he gets to see in person would be potential criminals. Singh hopes to be a cop. And those whom he intends to spare from his appointment diary are the general public. Singh's hopes are pinned on the new automated system that MHA plans to roll out across India, aimed at trimming the time the general public spends in doing the labyrinthine rounds of the good old police station, reports Economic Times.

At the Greater Kailash-1 police station in South Delhi, where Singh is the station house officer, the existing Zipnet search is pretty much an ornament. The system tracks from a set base of data, often outdated, and fails to read the latest inputs from other law enforcement agencies.

The new integrated system, that police officers like Singh are looking forward to, will network initially 14,000 police stations across the country, and all the 6,000 higher offices in police hierarchy (like headquarters, range offices, zonal offices). It will bring the benefits of India technology prowess to this British era institution, hopes Singh.

The MHA contract pegged at Rs. 2,000 crore will come up for bidding on Tuesday. Around 12 companies, including TCS, Infosys, Wipro, IBM and Accenture, would be participating to devise the system, slugged CCTNS-Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems. "Our work will get easier as systems get integrated. Theft and missing cases will be easily solved," says Singh who has already worked at the Delhi Police HQ, which has an existing provision to receive emailed complaints. For citizens, the system means online filing of complaints about stolen property, missing persons or even submitting anonymous intelligence and crime alerts.

All criminal complaints in the country will be allotted a number that can be used to access periodical status reports. The system will also offer details of unsolved cases, missing persons and stolen property besides allowing the general public to lodge complaints if they are not happy with the investigating officer. Already, TCS has done the IT implementation for Gujarat cops while Wipro has done it for Karnataka. But those systems don't talk to each other, which the CCTNS seeks to cure.

Home minister P Chidambaram wants it to be operational by 2012. Nirmaljeet Singh Kalsi, Punjab's former IT secretary, is assisting the minister in this in his capacity as MHA joint secretary. Kalsi was unavailable for comment on this story. "States will request for different bids, and technologies. The challenge will be integration," says an official working on the project requesting anonymity since he is not authorized to speak about CCTNS. Wipro's e-governance Head Ranbir Singh says a key hurdle in the path of integration will be the language factor. FIRs are normally filed in local languages, and integrating tens of languages into one electronic dossier could prove a data entry nightmare.