With Cyberabad police disclosing that security cameras at all Outer Ring Road’s toll booths were dysfunctional, which hampered investigations earlier, surveillance remains an unresolved issue.
When approached, Anand Kumar Samuel, project manager, ORR-HMDA, said, “The construction of the entire ORR itself is not over. There will be 180 toll gates. We have not yet called tenders for Toll Management Systems (TMS) under which CCTV cameras would be installed. We are waiting for Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) concurrence.” Once the TMS is implemented, it will have automatic vehicle classifiers and counters, he said.
“This will not only classify and count vehicles but also capture images of number plates,” he added. Earlier this year, soon after Dilsukhnagar bomb blasts, an RTI reply in March revealed that all the 51 close circuit television cameras (CCTV) under the Cyberabad traffic police department were defunct due to power problems or connectivity not established due to paucity of funds. Of the 51 cameras, 19 were installed in 2007 and 32 in 2010, but none thereafter. It is learnt that things have not got any better since. An additional 3,500 odd cameras were also planned to be put up by the state police in Greater Hyderabad limits. The plan has not taken off yet.
The Society for Cyberabad Security Council (SCSC), a coordinating body between Cyberabad police and IT companies in Cyberabad, during its annual general body meeting (AGM) had also decided to invest Rs 1.5 crore for improving security at various IT corridors in Cyberabad last year.