Digital pen and paper for Mumbai police

The Mumbai police is evaluating a digital pen, which can deliver first information reports (FIRs), besides crime and arrest reports to the headquarters within 45 seconds of the report being completed.

Dhananjay Datar, CEO of Pune-based Impact Systems, which has developed the digital pen technology, told Business Standard: "One of the major problems faced by the Mumbai police's top brass was that they have a huge backlog of crime records, which needs to be uploaded to central server to be later accessed to decide the future course of investigations in any particular case. Policemen generally record the FIR or other legal documents like notes, and panchanamas manually and then send it to the police headquarters for data entry. Due to the large number of crimes and inadequate staff at the record room, details regarding the crime taken place, etc, used to get uploaded to the central server after six months or more."

Another problem with manual data entry, he said was that there was always a chance of human errors and some important information getting omitted by the person who is doing data entry.

Currently the company was trying out its technology at six police stations and if successful, it would implement in all police stations of Mumbai.

Datar explains the technology is simple. Instead of writing the FIR with an ordinary pen and paper, policemen have to write it with the digital pen and paper.

And they are slightly different from our ordinary pen and paper. When a policeman is writing a report, the digital pen converts each stroke of the pen into computer readable code that can then be easily transmitted to a central server.

In the Mumbai Police trial, reports could be delivered to headquarters in under a minute of the report being completed. The digital paper is slightly thicker than the normal paper. As you write on the digital paper with a digital pen, the pen captures and stores what you have written and can transfer it to your computer.

"The cost of the pilot project, which we are implementing in the six police stations is around Rs 25 lakh and which includes the cost of software developed by the company and hardware like computers, digital pens and electronic papers. The technology has its application in areas like healthcare, insurance, banks, telecom companies and in every sector where one has to fill forms, and information written on these forms has to be manually entered into computers," he said.

The company is currently in talks with some insurance companies for whom it is customising its software.

According to him, some companies offer a digital pen technology for personal use at around Rs 12,000 in which they offer, software, pen and a notebook of digital paper.

"We have miles to go before it becomes as popular as a mobile phone. The major hurdle is the cost of paper as currently a single digital paper costs more than Re 1 per page," said Datar.