In an attempt to boost technological resources and know-how, Punjab police have appointed Dhruv Singhal as their Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Singhal is a former technology head at Amazon Internet Services.

He has been appointed to train the police force to deal with tech-savvy and data-driven criminals. The lockdown and curfew in the past two months have brought the state police face to face with criminals, especially the cross border terrorists, using highly sophisticated technology and equipment like drones to smuggle arms, phones, cash and drugs across the Indo-Pak border.

DGP Dinkar Gupta said that factors like hostile conditions at the border have increased deployment of drones to smuggle drugs and weapons into Punjab, and increased cyber frauds over the last few months made it imperative to scale up the force’s technology thrust.

Singhal served for more than 30 years in the IT industry and his last assignment was as head of technology at Amazon Internet Services, the Indian subsidiary of Amazon Web Services. Singhal graduated from IIT Delhi and IIM Calcutta and specializes in application integration, databases, and big data among others.