Mumbai to ‘Go live’ from Monday

Shiv Kumar

Tribune News Service

Mumbai, November 27

The Maharashtra Government has decided to speed up installation of closed circuit television cameras (CCTVs) across Mumbai even though the requisite back-end to monitor the footage continuously is nowhere in sight.

At an event to mark the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai yesterday, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced that CCTVs in south Mumbai would be rolled out from Monday.

While more than 900 cameras have been installed and connected at major locations here, the facility to monitor the footage in real time is yet to come up.

“The new control room to monitor the CCTV footage is still under construction and it will take at least two months for it become fully operational,” a Home Department source said.

The control room will have a wall projection panel in which CCTVs can be monitored in real time.

Police personnel who will monitor the footage round the clock are still being trained, say sources. According to sources, the footage obtained from the CCTVs that go live on Monday will only be recorded and the archives will be available for investigation.

The government has, however, decided to rush with the roll-out of CCTVs as part of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ image-building exercise, sources say.

“It was pending for the past seven years and we completed it in less than a year. The pan Mumbai surveillance will be launched by the same time in 2016,” Fadnavis said in a message on Twitter.

It will take at least another year for the entire city to be covered by more than 5,000 CCTVs. As per the orders of the Mumbai police, CCTVs installed on private premises will also have to be aligned with the devices launched by the authorities concerned so that seamless monitoring of vehicular and other activity is possible.

According to the plans announced by the state government, all patrol vehicles of the Mumbai police will be fitted with the global positioning system (GPS) so that the nearest vehicle can be dispatched to any location at the earliest.

The CCTVs will also ensure monitoring of police personnel who are posted in the field.