E-Paper
Surveillance cameras helped Chandigarh police solve 250 criminal cases
As many as 5.47 lakh challans were also issued for traffic violations recorded in the cameras set up under the Chandigarh Smart City project
The tech-powered closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance system set up under the Smart City project helped Chandigarh Police solve 250 criminal cases and 5.47 lakh traffic challans were issued to violators between March 2022 and February 26, 2023.
With an aim to bolster security and help improve the monitoring of traffic as well as the law-and-order situation, around 900 CCTV cameras had been installed at various locations across the city — with the footage being monitored through the Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC).
Around 285 different locations in the city including intersections, government schools, entry and exit points, water treatment facilities, parking lots, hospital entrances, gardens are under real-time surveillance. Gauging the impact, the latest data shows that the CCTV surveillance system has assisted police teams in solving more than 250 cases involving murder, snatching, road accident, thefts among others in the past seven months.
Speaking about the same, Chandigarh Smart City Limited chief executive officer Anindita Mitra said, “The component of Smart City Mission went live in October 2022 and was under stabilisation period for three months till January, 2023, during which challenges like firmware upgrades, system failures, application issues, hardware compatibility issues, maintenance challenges were faced. Despite that, the CCTV cameras have been serving the city from the date of installation and have been helping the police department.”
“During the month of December 2022, all connected cameras were monitored by the ICCC’s enterprise management system. Chandigarh Smart City has entered into a service-level agreement (SLA) with the system integrator for real time monitoring of cameras so that the quality of service does not deteriorate during maintenance period,” she added.
As per data from December 2022, according to the agreed SLA, 79% cameras were working within the maintenance range, 20% were working outside maintenance range and only 1% remaining cameras had limited availability due to repair works on the field such as junction improvement, civil repair work, school building renovation, power cable repair.
Further, the system is built with local storage to reduce the impact of network outage. If for any reason, the camera-connected local processing unit is unable to transfer data to the ICCC data centre, it has the capability to retain the data locally and resume sending data to the ICCC as soon as the network is reconnected. In the event of an emergency, this data can be gathered using LPUs, ensuring no data loss in the event of a network failure.
System more robust now: Mitra
Addressing the success of the stabilisation, Mitra said, “Now that the CCTV surveillance system has successfully crossed the stabilisation period, the system has become more robust and vigorous. Our cameras are working at an efficiency of more than 97% at all the connected sites. The system has not only helped in keeping our citizens safe but has also reduced the crime rate in the city.”
“As many as 5,47,900 challans have been issued between March 2022 and February 26, 2023. This has resulted in improved road safety as well as reduction in traffic personnel deployed,” she added.
