Mega cities like Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Ahmedabad may soon be covered by aerial surveillance as the Union ministry of home affairs formalises a “safe city” project to be rolled out in seven cities.
The MHA wants to equip each of these cities with constant aerial surveillance using UAVs, helicopters and balloons with gadgets and sensors and highway patrol cars “with the capacity to overtake and chase criminals”. Each city will have a “Command Control Centre (CCC)” set up exclusively to handle emergency response and policing functions in these cities as it will collect all data — video, audio and text — for both preventive and post-incident operations. There will also be a data centre, or “fusion centre”, on the lines of the fusion centre in the United States, within the CCC, where UID data, PAN card, residential and crime data records will be made available with technology for face recognition to detect suspects and criminals.
The MHA’s futuristic plan is expected to get a fillip when Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde visits the US for the homeland security dialogue beginning Monday. Mr Shinde is slated to visit “fusion centres” in New York, Boston and Washington, DC, besides visiting police control rooms and police stations in these cities.
The near 15-member MHA delegation visiting the US is keen to seek American assistance for training its policemen in “homeland security”. Back home, the MHA has been at the receiving end for several months now for the inept handling of law and order in the face of rising incidents of crimes against women and public protests in the national capital.
The MHA has conceded in its note that the present form of policing depends more on manpower and less on technology, making it “inadequate for handling modern law and order problems, crime control and other emergencies”.
To combine the best of “man and machine”, the MHA envisions the Command Control Centre as one which will have video walls where live feeds from CCTV cameras installed across the city will be received continuously and which will have the ability to zero in on any particular CCTV camera.