These days I meet people and generally talk about perceptions and requirements. Invariably the talk veers towards “Smart City Programmes”…. Mostly I guess the Term “City Surveillance” is losing its sheen.
Sales Guys!!!!!! The Lengths they will go to try and bring something new on the table even when they don’t have a clue as to what they mean!
City Surveillance began as a Pilot project at a few intersections at Jaipur in 2002 -2003 under the guise of Traffic Management. This Pilot project was carried out of India’s premier R&D centre C-DAC Trivandrum under the leadership of Shri. V. Muralidharan, Director, C-DACP & Shri. P. Ravikumar, Deputy Director, CIG, C-DAC. Later this was repeated at Pune. A paper on this can be found at
I was associated with both these projects and in a way can take some amount of credit for being the first to start implementing surveillance which could have a positive impact on our daily life and make travel and commute safer and better. I am proud of this achievement.
However I am not here to TOMTOM my achievements but the thought which comes to me is
Are we Indian’s doing the right thing by trying to do stuff which is neither here or there and which in the long will not benefit any of us?
What am I talking about?
Let’s face it…. We are happily going about selling City Surveillance and Smart City Projects across the country.
I am also aware of a number of Large Multi National Organisations who are happily meeting various Governments with offers of financing schemes as long as their systems are installed. Come on you Sales Guys this is your country! The Country deserves systems and processes which we can provide to fulfill our objectives without compromising on quality of surveillance! Sadly our Truly Fantastic Sales Guys are happy doing their numbers, grabbing their sales incentives / bonuses and forget that they sell stuff that their country doesnot deserve.
A truly smart city approach would be integration of all possible video feeds from all public surveillance feeds to be really effective since this would actually enable transfer of data between agencies. After all the Law Enforcement Agency is the one which comes into operation the moment an incident takes place.
I don’t want to sound like the proverbial guy with the Pin to prick the bubble but the truth is that this is not possible in today’s scenario and there is no thought process that the road to be taken needs to have a destination of commonality!
Now this is interesting..Spare some of your time and think…
What if we have a common platform across cities which would be truly SMART!
We can achieve
- A Common Database of Criminals which can be shared and updated online on the go across cities
- Video Feeds could be accessed across cities from any location across the country
- A nationalized database which the centre can access and step in for priority requirements
Face Recognition options for the Law Enforcement Agencies for online recognition and updation of Database right from the streets to Police Stations to Check Post at borders to Jails and Various Public Locations across the Country!
Will we ever get to being SMART from a Technology point of View?
We are as a race extremely SMART!
By the way I was speaking about CCTV! ☺☺☺☺
No comments:
Post a Comment