Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday, June 19, 2026, launched four technology applications at the 26th All India Fingerprint Conference-2026, aimed at accelerating forensic identification and digital coordination across India's criminal justice agencies. The applications — NCRB-Abhigyan, CrPI, E-Forensics 2.0 and E-Prosecution 2.0 — were described by the Minister as tools to deliver 'speed and accuracy in justice delivery.'

Context

Speaking at the conference, Shah said the four applications would enable 'instant matching of fingerprints, integrated DNA, iris and face matching and seamless digital coordination among agencies.' The All India Fingerprint Conference is an annual national forum convened to advance fingerprint science, forensic identification and inter-agency technology standards. The 26th edition brought together police forces, forensic scientists and prosecution officials from across the country.

Policy backdrop

The launch builds on a multi-year digitisation drive by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), introduced in 2009, first sought to digitise police records and enable nationwide data sharing. A decade later, the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS), inaugurated in 2022, created a centralised digital fingerprint repository managed by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The four applications launched on Friday are positioned as the next layer atop these existing platforms, extending biometric integration beyond fingerprints to include DNA, iris and facial recognition data.

The NCRB, which sits under the Home Ministry, has historically maintained India's crime databases and forensic coordination infrastructure. The new suite of tools is designed to reduce manual processes that have long been cited as a source of delay in investigation and prosecution workflows.

Stakeholders and impact

The primary beneficiaries of the new applications are state and central police forces, forensic laboratories and prosecution agencies. By enabling integrated matching across multiple biometric modalities — fingerprint, DNA, iris and face — the tools are intended to shorten the identification cycle in criminal investigations. The seamless digital coordination feature in E-Prosecution 2.0 and E-Forensics 2.0 is aimed at reducing inter-agency paperwork and the delays it creates between investigation, forensic analysis and court proceedings.

India's courts have long grappled with high case pendency, and a portion of that backlog is attributed to delays in forensic reporting and evidence documentation. Digital coordination tools of this nature are seen by the MHA as a structural intervention in that chain.

What's next

Attention will now turn to state-level rollout timelines and the degree to which these applications integrate with the existing CCTNS infrastructure. Parliamentary oversight and periodic NCRB performance reports will be key indicators of whether the tools measurably improve investigation speed or conviction efficiency. The MHA's broader push to embed biometric identification across criminal justice workflows suggests further upgrades to this ecosystem are likely in the near term.