Police will get access to video, digital feed as part of Gurugram civic body’s CCTV project

As part of the GMDA’s ‘City Wide CCTV Based Public Safety and Adaptive Traffic Management System’, the police department will get access to extensive surveillance infrastructure spread out across Gurugram and Manesar.

As part of the GMDA’s ‘City Wide CCTV Based Public Safety and Adaptive Traffic Management System’, the police department will get access to extensive surveillance infrastructure spread out across Gurugram and Manesar. Officials in the GMDA and police department said this will have wide-reaching implications for how crime is monitored, and responded to, in the city.

Police have identified five areas where it will deploy ‘full surveillance’ measures, using fixed and ‘PTZ’ cameras which will be able to capture footage in 4K quality.

The police department, in consultation with the GMDA, has identified five areas where it will deploy ‘full surveillance’ measures, using fixed and ‘PTZ’ cameras which will be able to capture footage in 4K quality. These locations include Ghata village T-point, Galleria Market, Sector 55/56 Rapid Metro Station, Signature Tower and ABW Tower.

Police commissioner Muhammad Akil said the surveillance system would be a useful tool to monitor activities across the city and to receive alerts regarding possible crime. “This in turn will help us to respond to crime quicker, especially in time sensitive cases such as carjackings.”

Seven police stations in the city, and one in Manesar, will also be provided with a video feed viewing facility which will give them access to real-time footage from 1200 CCTV cameras across Gurugram and Manesar. These include police stations in Sadar, Sector 56, Cybercell, Badshahpur, Sector 15, Udyog Vihar and City police station, and IMT Manesar police station.

As part of the project’s ‘full surveillance’ umbrella, the police will also be provided with a facial recognition system (FRS) “for identifying or verifying a person from a digital image file or video source,” according to bid documents on the GMDA website.

As per the bid documents, the FRS will “capture face images from CCTV feed and generate alerts, search photographs from the database matching suspect features, match suspected criminal face from pre-recorded video feeds obtained from CCTVs deployed in various critical identified locations, and investigate to check the identity of individuals upon receiving such requests from police stations”.

Akil said, “The FRS will make it easier for us to identify and nab the accused, if caught on camera, and the footage will serve as a tamper proof record for post event analysis.”

He added that the police would store routine footage for a period between 15 days to a month, and is working out the finer details of how it will operate once the system goes live.