Centre to release National Registry of Sexual Offenders today: All you need to know

New Delhi, Sep 20: India will launch a National Registry of Sex Offenders on Thursday. Once rolled out, India will become the ninth country to be able to maintain such a thorough database.

The National Registry of Sexual Offenders - the first-of-its-kind - will have key details like names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, and PAN and Aadhaar numbers, of convicted sexual offenders

The move comes against the backdrop of a nearly three percent increase in crimes against women and a 12-percent rise in rapes in 2016 as compared to 2015.

"The national registry of crimes against women will be launched next month. The records are being sourced from the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS)," a senior Union Home Ministry official said.

The National Crime Records Bureau will be the nodal agency to maintain the sex-offenders' registry. It will help the law-enforcement agencies in identifying the repeat offenders, while people, too, would be aware of those involved in sex crimes, the official said.

According to NCRB data, as many as 38,947 rape cases were registered in 2016, against 34,651 in 2015. Overall crimes against women rose from 3,29,243 in 2015 to 3,38,954 in 2016.

A majority of cases categorised as crimes against women were reported under cruelty by husband or his relatives (32.6 per cent), followed by assault on woman with intent to outrage her modesty (25 per cent), kidnapping and abduction of women (19 per cent), and rape (11.5 per cent).

Madhya Pradesh reported the highest number of rape cases (4,882) in 2016, followed by Uttar Pradesh (4,816) and Maharashtra (4,189).

Other countries

Ahead of India, UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago have been maintaining the data of sex offenders. In the US, documents can be accessed by public, but in India, the details will be available only to law enforcement agencies.