24.6.13

Safe City Project snippets

Seven metropolitan cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Ahmedabad — will soon have individual air surveillance systems where helicopters with gun-toting commandos, balloons fitted with cameras and sophisticated sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will keep round-the-clock vigil over the cities.
The system, which was successfully used in the Capital during the 2010 Commonwealth Games, will now be replicated in all these cities under the ‘Safe City Project’ of the home ministry. It will be a permanent feature in all the seven metropolitan cities, unlike the one used in Delhi only during the Games period.
The ministry had, in February, approved Rs.432 crore for this purpose, which is an integral part of the mega-city policing plan of the government. The CCTV surveillance, command control centre, highway patrol cars and fusion centre (keeping all data having bearing on safety and security at one place) are other components of this project. The fund will be used to procure modern equipment like GPS/GIS (geographic information system) for the dial 100 system and patrol cars, CCTV systems, vehicle scanners, vehicle number plate identification system, cyber patrol and communication monitoring system and integrated GIS-based automated vehicle tracking and management system.
In its latest guidelines on the ‘Safe City Project’, the ministry said, “Air surveillance can be obtained by positioning various equipment i.e. balloons, UAVs, helicopters etc which should have gadgets like cameras, sensors etc to cater to specialized requirements on the occasion.”
The data (video, audio, text) collected from these devices would be fed to the command control centre (CCC) for necessary action for both preventive and post-incident operations.
It said the CCC – having a network of computer systems — would be the heart of the Safe City Project. Such centres — one each in every city — will have the capacity to store, analyze and disseminate data, wherever required, though a ‘fusion centre’. The fusion centre will keep comprehensive database from various fields like vehicle registration numbers, UID numbers of citizens, residential addresses, PAN card details and crime-related details. It will, eventually, be linked with the Centre’s NATGRID — National Intelligence Grid – project.

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