Bhopal to have India’s first safe city monitoring centre

BHOPAL: India’s first safe city monitoring and response centre, a centralised system to monitor the state, is being set up in the state capital.
CCTV cameras put up across all the cities of Madhya Pradesh would be linked with this centre and if anything happens anywhere, the top officials in the capital may view live pictures, all they need to do is to reach this centre. Officials in secretariat said it will help them get first-hand information of the ground situation instead of relying on the local administration for inputs, in case of any untoward incident, including riots or any law and order issue. The safe city monitoring and response centre is coming up behind the radio headquarters of the state police on Bhadbhada road. Officials said it is a Rs 429-crore project of the Madhya Pradesh government in which web of CCTV cameras is spread across the state while the centre alone would cost around Rs 4 crore.
ADGP (Telecommunications) Anvesh Manglam said it is the first of its kind centre in the country. CCTV cameras installed in a city are usually linked to local police control rooms, but the safe city monitoring response centre would link CCTV cameras of the entire state under one roof. At present, there are 3,000 cameras at 800 locations in 11 cities of the state. Officials said the centre will get operational in the next two months and all 800 locations can be viewed from the centre in Bhopal. Besides, another 10,000 cameras are being installed in 50 cities of the state and by the next year 61 cities of Madhya Pradesh will be monitored through CCTV cameras linked with the centre in the city.
Regarding the centre, officials said civil and hardware work has been completed. Now, the standard operating procedures are being laid down and training of the staffers is underway. They have started receiving the feed from different cities and testing procedure is on.
Apart from keep a vigil throughout state, officials said it will also help in knowing where the cameras are defunct in the cities and due to what reason. Officials said it is a common problem that CCTV cameras remain defunct for long and the local administration at times turns a blind eye to it, which ultimately defeats the purpose behind having CCTV surveillance.