GUWAHATI, May 22 - The system of online uploading of details of guests by the hotels of Guwahati, which was formally launched in 2014, may be discontinue because of a serious difference of opinion among the hotel owners and service providers over payment issues.
Police sources told The Assam Tribune that the system is helpful both for the law enforcing agencies and the hotel owners. At one point of time, the hotel owners had to send a person to the nearest police station around 8 pm every day with details of the guests. But after introduction of the system, they (hotel owners) can simply upload the data and the police can check the same whenever necessary without going through lots of papers.
Sources admitted that at the time of development of the software, some funds were provided to the company involved, but as the police does not have special funds for the same, the software company and the hotel owners were asked to get into an agreement on payments.
Police sources said that a few meetings were held with the office-bearers of the hotel owners� associations and �we asked the hotel owners and the service providers to arrive at an agreement on the rate to be paid to the service provider. The police cannot accept money from the hotel owners and hand that over to the service provider. Both parties should come to an agreement in this regard,� sources added.
Secretary of the Hotel and Restaurant Association of Assam, Tridib Sarma said that they have started receiving messages from the service provider to pay up Rs 3,000. He said that they were ready to pay money for the service but �we are not aware on what basis the rates were calculated by the service provider�. He said the rates were fixed by the service provider arbitrarily and the hotel owners have the right to know the details of the basis on which the rates were finalised.
On the other hand, S Hassan, founder of Glomindz Software, which is running Crimatrix, a cloud-based platform, said that the project started in October, 2012 under the guidance of then DGP JN Choudhury and Guwahati Crime Branch. Crimatrix�s mission is to build �a community driven real-time crime monitoring platform� for police and public to collaborate and prevent crime in smart cities of future.
The pilot project started with two modules � vehicle theft reporting/analysis module and hotel guest list submission module. By June, 2013, more than 100 hotels joined the platform to submit their hotel guest list to police as per the Sarai�s Act 1867. On the basis of the result of the pilot project, an order was issued by the DC (Kamrup) to all hotels/lodges in Guwahati in July 2013 to submit their guest list online through Crimatrix. By September 2016, the registered hotels had grown to over 300. The servers were analysing more than 1,500 new guest records and photographs daily.
Hassan said that as they had to upgrade the servers and the cost increased exponentially, they decided to introduce yearly subscription fees for the hotels to maintain the project. So, in discussion with the Crime Branch, meetings were held with hotel owners to discuss the issue.
Initially, different pricing models were discussed based on hotel sizes. But based on feedback received from hotels, it was decided to take a fixed subscription fee of Rs 3000 per year from each hotel, Hassan said.