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Used sub-optimally, the Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) that was built for Rs 35.96 crore under the Smart City mission to help the municipal corporation detect encroachment and other violations using its CCTV network of 1,401 cameras leads to hardly any ground action. At a recent meeting in Delhi about Smart City projects, the Ludhiana officials were told to increase their ICCC utilisation.
This centre’s performance report that the MC’s had filed with the deputy commissioner’s office recently was confined to police operations mostly, while this system can do much more than improving urban safety, security, and surveillance. The control room can catch camera tampering, unattended objects, illegal parking, encroachment, red-light jumpers, dysfunctional streetlights, and theft of rooftop solar panels. The system can also track getaway vehicles, waste trucks, MC cars, local buses, and fire tenders.
The cameras can also monitor the collection of property tax, water bills, and cow cess, besides waste disposal, pet registration, complaint assessment under the Swatch Bharat Mission, and decision-making. UID Number Plates and GIS maps can also let the city keep track of demolition, protests, public gatherings, events, fire emergencies, defacement, graffiti, garbage heaps, air quality, other forms of pollution, secondary waste collection points, compactors, effluents in the Buddha Nullah, and sewage treatment plants (STPs).
The initial idea was to just spot encroachment and defacement, but now it’s an unused multi-service. The cops do monitor live feed from these CCTVs to solve crime, but the MC officials are not sincere watchers. Confronted about the advice served at Delhi to increase the ICCC utilisation, MC’s superintending engineer Sanjay Kanwar claimed that: “We do monitor the city from the ICCC and report all violations to the officers concerned, but there’s nothing to report when there’s no action in the city.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): nidhi.bhardwaj
Quelle/Source: The Times of India, 14.08.2024