After terrorists struck Dilsukhnagar more than two weeks ago, police are persuading small shop owners as well as managements of big commercial complexes to install surveillance cameras as a minimum security precaution. Curiously, one of the biggest software facilities in the city – Raheja IT Park – has no surveillance cameras at its entrance and on the roads inside.
Raheja IT Park houses the offices of several software companies on its premises in Madhapur.
Heavy footfall
Nearly 50,000 software professionals and thousands of others enter the campus daily. The number of vehicles used by employees and offices too runs into thousands. Yet, for some strange reason, no surveillance cameras have been installed on any of the roads inside the park.
Curiously, all offices on the campus have surveillance cameras in their respective buildings. There are nearly 20 structures, each having a minimum of 10 floors. There are also buildings which have more than 100 cameras each, but there are no cameras to keep track of those entering the place. Surveillance cameras will be of great use to keep track of those moving around, instead of depending on just one or two security guards manning the entry points.
“We wrote to the Raheja IT Park administration some 18 months ago, asking them to install cameras. It is up to them,” the Madhapur Police said on Tuesday.
Currently, police have to bank on the footage provided by six cameras installed at Mind Space junction, some distance away from the campus. Police maintained that they had succeeded in persuading the management of a hotel in front of the park to install cameras.
In the Dilsukhnagar blasts, the video footage recorded by a traffic surveillance camera at Rajiv Chowk turned out to be the crucial clue for the investigators. Realising that surveillance cameras could be of critical importance in preventing and investigating any terrorist activity, the government had decided to install 3,000 cameras at public places at an estimated cost of Rs. 450 crore.
