Operationalise Safe City Project by August: Saxena to Delhi Police

Delhi will soon have a seamless network of sensors implemented as part of the Phase 1 of the Safe City Project. Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena on Monday reviewed the progress of the Central government-funded initiative and issued instructions to complete the first phase of the ₹798-crore project by August to ensure technology-enabled enhanced policing and better security for citizens, especially women, Raj Niwas officials said.

Delhi will soon have a seamless network of sensors implemented as part of the first phase of the Safe City Project. Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena on Monday reviewed the progress of the Central government-funded initiative and issued instructions to Delhi Police to operationalise the ₹798-crore project by August to ensure technology-enabled enhanced policing and better security for citizens, especially women, Raj Niwas officials said.

Law and order in the city, especially women’s safety, has been a point of contention between the L-G and the Aam Aadmi Party government of late. Last week after a woman was shot at on the Saket court premises, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had said the law and order machinery in Delhi has “completely broken down”. In an apparent attack on Mr. Saxena, the Chief Minister had tweeted, “Instead of obstructing the work of others and doing dirty politics on everything, everyone should focus on their own work. And if someone can’t handle things, the person should resign so that someone else can do it.”

A Ministry of Home Affairs initiative in collaboration with the Ministry of Women and Child Development under the Nirbhaya Fund in eight metro cities — Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Lucknow — the project aims to create a safe, secure and empowering environment for women and girls in public spaces. Under the project, 10,582 CCTV cameras will be installed. Besides, a command and control centre will also be set up with facilities for video analytics, AI, machine-learning, facial recognition, etc., at police headquarters, district headquarters and police stations. Two mobile command and control vehicles and 88 Prakhar Vans equipped with mobile data terminal, body-worn cameras, etc. will also be deployed.

The cost of the projects is shared in a 60:40 ratio between the Central government and the States concerned. In Delhi, however, the project is fully funded by the Centre and implemented by the Delhi Police through the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). The Pune-based C-DAC has appointed RailTel and NEC India to install CCTV cameras and connect them to feeders and main servers, respectively.

A Raj Niwas official said, “The L-G issued instructions to incorporate AI-based applications into the project to ensure real-time crowd assessment, picking up behavioural traits and discrepancies, and immediately notifying the command and control centres in police headquarters, the district offices and police stations for immediate response in case of deviations that point out towards impending crime.”

On the project’s current status, the Raj Niwas official said the survey of locations identified for installation of field devices such as CCTV cameras, poles, junction boxes, gunshot detection, etc., has been completed, and work has started on installation of poles and laying of cables.