Next time when you walk or drive on the stretches of Ramgopalpet police station-Bata showroom or Chitra dargah-Rashtrapati road in Secunderabad, your movements would be captured at least by two or more of the 40 high definition cameras installed by the police there.
These 40 HD cameras, which can record crystal clear images, were affixed at select points on the two stretches as part of the pilot project of Community Policing of Hyderabad police. The police top brass is hoping that this prestigious project, to be inaugurated in a week by political bigwigs of the State, will encourage people to adopt similar systems or join the one initiated by them.
Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao envisaged that every inch of the city should be under electronic surveillance. On an average, nearly 2,000 such cameras would be required to cover the entire area in the jurisdiction of a police station and that translates into more than one lakh cameras for the whole city. Apparently, the government doesn’t have money enough to purchase that many cameras, bear maintenance costs and pay Internet bandwidth charges. Citing the Public Security (Measures) Enforcement Act, the city police had been persuading managements of shops, business establishments, apartment buildings and educational institutions to install security cameras.
It yielded some results but using cameras and equipment of different specifications made the system more complex and it was of little use to overall public security. As a first step towards an effective camera surveillance system, Hyderabad Police Commissioner M. Mahender Reddy undertook the pilot project in Mahankali.
While fixed cameras were installed at the points where by-lanes join the main road, dome cameras which can be panned, tilted or zoomed from the control room located in Mahankali police station were fixed at junctions.
Steel junction boxes that are dust, water and wind proof are affixed with router switches, media converters and power supply units. They are linked to the command centre in Mahankali police station having three monitors. On one monitor, footage through all 40 cameras can be seen. The second one is used to zoom the particular camera on a specified area and the third to monitor vehicle tracking system through GPS. Interestingly, this system has dedicated optic fibre line for relaying video footage and additional monthly Internet charges are not incurred.
