Kerala Police: leading innovation in India
Kerala Police is the law enforcement agency for the State of Kerala, India. Kerala police was recently recognized as the best police force in India, both in maintaining law and order and in adopting technological developments to achieve excellence in public services delivery. As a pioneer of community policing — known locally as “janamithri” or “people-friendly” policing, Kerala Police has earned a reputation among Indian police agencies for innovation and leadership.
In its role as innovator, Kerala Police wanted to reimagine how digital services could make police work easier, safer and more efficient. Previous attempts to create a digital policing platform for Indian police forces had been based on slow, inflexible monolithic applications — and progress in eGovernance had been limited.
Kerala Police had decided in 2019 to take a different approach, harnessing a new generation of networking, cloud, and containerization technologies to create a microservices architecture for digital policing. This would empower development teams to build and scale services independently to meet the force’s ever evolving needs.
At the same time, the force knew that technology is only part of the equation. Software can be well-architected, performance optimized and bug-free, but if it hasn’t been designed with its end-users in mind, it won’t be useful — and won’t be used.
The strategy, therefore, was to ensure that the solution would be designed by the police, for the police. By building on open-source technologies, Kerala Police could give its development team — recruited from the ranks of its own officers — complete freedom to create the services that police and citizens really need.
At-a-Glance
Kerala Police had to ensure both the cost-efficiency and quality of its new digital policing platform. Following a comprehensive commercial and technical evaluation, including proofs-of-concept, the force had selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system for its new containerized microservices, and Rancher Prime to manage its Kubernetes clusters.
Thanks to the microservices approach supported by Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Kerala Police has been able to prioritize the services its officers and citizens need most urgently. It has been able to deploy these new services into production independently, enabling a gradual replacement of the functionalities of its previous-generation system.
Why SUSE?
To make the best use of taxpayers’ money, Kerala Police had to ensure both the cost-efficiency and quality of its new digital policing platform. Following a comprehensive commercial and technical evaluation, including proofs-of-concept, the force had selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system for its new containerized microservices, and Rancher Prime to manage its Kubernetes clusters.
P. Prakash IPS, Inspector General, South Zone and Nodal Officer, CCTNS Kerala Police comments: “The advantage of open source is that we can always modify the software to meet our needs, without being locked in by any vendor. Open source allows us to take full advantage of microservices, with more flexible development, faster time to market, and complete freedom to integrate new technologies when we need them.”
Microservices architectures can be complex, so it’s vital to manage them with tools you can trust.
“The advantage of open source is that we can always modify the software to meet our needs, without being locked in by any vendor.”
Digital services designed by police, for police
Thanks to the microservices approach supported by Rancher Prime and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Kerala Police has been able to prioritize the services its officers and citizens need most urgently. It has been able to deploy these new services into production independently, enabling a gradual replacement of the functionalities of its previous-generation system.
98% of citizens apply for permits online
Kerala Police is a pioneer among Indian states in adopting all the available advanced digital means for ensuring easy access for citizens to police services. The microservices architecture has made it easy for the Kerala Police in-house development team and TCS to develop and add on citizen service modules and crime case investigation-related modules in an efficient manner, without requiring any downtime for application updates, and while ensuring business continuity.
The development team at Kerala Police, assisted by the TCS team, has built a citizen portal and mobile app to allow citizens to submit complaints, apply for various permits and so on via online means, eliminating paperwork and delays. This has proven extremely popular with users — within four months of launch, 98% of citizens are now applying online. In this way, visits by the public to police stations have been reduced considerably.
A new mobile app for police officers
Meanwhile, TCS and the Kerala Police in-house development team have launched the first iteration of a mobile app exclusively for police officers in Kerala. Over the coming months, the team will continue to enhance the app with new features until it provides a one-stop-shop for all the functionality that officers need in the field. This will eliminate tedious, time-consuming paperwork and unnecessary delays, freeing officers to focus on policing rather than record keeping.
Officers will be able to respond to callouts, look up data from police databases, view maps of crime hotspots, perform analyses and submit reports — all without needing to return to the station. This will significantly improve efficiency, as well as giving officers the information and insight they need to stay safe, protect citizens and fight crime effectively.
Next – increased security
The immediate focus for the Kerala Police development team is to continue developing and rolling out new services for officers and citizens, with the aim of phasing out its legacy policing platform entirely within the next six months. Even so, the team has started to consider its future roadmap, and is discussing the potential for adopting additional SUSE tools, such as Harvester for managing hyperconverged infrastructure alongside its Kubernetes clusters, and NeuVector for full-lifecycle container security.