Phased CCTV push for women’s safety

New Delhi: In a move to strengthen women’s safety in the national capital, the Delhi government has drawn up a plan for phase-wise installation of advanced CCTV cameras at a cost of around Rs 646 crore, officials said on Thursday.

Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, in her maiden budget presentation in the Delhi Assembly last year, announced a 24X7 CCTV surveillance system for women’s safety in the city, allocating Rs 100 crore for the financial year for installing the closed-circuit cameras. The preliminary estimates by the PWD have pegged the cost of the project at Rs 646.41 crore, including third-party quality assurance, contingencies and cess charges, said a senior Delhi government officer. A control command centre set up at the MSO building near ITO or any other location to be decided by the Delhi Police, will receive feed from the cameras.

The Centre will have separate servers for the dashboard and incident module, network management, recording, streaming and automatic number plate recognition, storage devices, software, firewall and other needed items. The CCTV cameras will include 49,900 internet protocol (IP) Bullet CCTV cameras equipped with 512 GB secure digital (SD) card at dark spots in the city, according to the list provided by the Women and Child Development department and Delhi Police. Further, 100 four megapixel Automatic Number Plate Recognition CCTV cameras with infrared vision for better night visual quality and resolution upto 100 metres will be installed at dark spots in consultation with Delhi Police.