How the Nanded police reduced crime by using technology

MUMBAI, INDIA: Nanded, a small city which lies 600 kilometers east of Mumbai, has historic significance.

It houses the second biggest gurudwara (after the Golden Temple in Amritsar), and hosts about five to six lakh religious tourists, at least four to five times a year.

Challenges:
Lately, the district was witnessing a sudden spurt in criminal activities, especially chain snatching incidents. Plus it was becoming difficult to mind traffic on all arterial roads manually. Increasing number of religious processions and ad-hoc calls for halla-bol was creating a serious policing issue for the local men in khakhee.

Pankaj Deshmukh, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Nanded, informs, “Besides the figures mentioned above, we receive more than 6,000 religious pilgrims every day. The incidents of chain snatching and some religious sprouts which would have disturbed the religious fabric of this fine city had started springing. Thus far, we were relying on wireless communication with beat marshals, or information we received at the police stations. We realized that it was time to take suo moto action.”

The solution and implementation:
Considering the above challenges, the municipal council decided to take-up a Smart Nanded city project. It decided to set-up a command & control infrastructure, emergency response software,    PTZ and night vision fixed cameras, emergency vehicle tracking system, distress communication and integrate the infrastructure with all the stake holders.

Prasad Patil, CEO, MIPL, the Systems Integrator, who deployed the solutions, visited and studied similar deployments in Surat, Delhi and Bangalore, and added his own unique touch to Nanded.

He says, “After the observations, we decided to convert the city surveillance project into a safe city project. We asked for more funds, and rather than just making it a camera specific project we turned it into a safe city by including other elements of technology like C-cube tracking system, disaster management, audio public address system and panic switches on all the chowks in Nanded, which is a simple push button device which alerts the control room in case of any emergency or distress. After adding all these elements, we informed the DPR and got its approval.”

While surveillance was important, but, it was just not enough and the SI decided to add an intelligent system to turn it into a safe city. “This allows the government to reach or give out audio messages across the city. It allows people remotely to get connected to the control room.

Secondly, we asked the corporation to set up a full network, so there was 45 kms of network that was setup. It is a whole optical fiber network and that has given us lot of scalability for the project. In phase-1 of the project there are 104 cameras and now we are coming up with the second phase of the project which has more than 120 cameras, and we are hardly incurring any expense for networking,” Patil states.

On its part, the Nanded police, also trained in de-briefing, real time emergency system, which can help in coordinating messages and action if an incident is reported.

How the solution is helping?
Asserts Deshmukh, “With the new technology, it is now easy to anticipate activities. For instance, we have been able to stop flash mobs as we can now monitor sudden congregation of people, quickly inform the local police station, and the mob is disintegrated. Secondly, the cameras act as a deterrent to the people, who know that they are being watched. In the process, we have also learnt about crowd behavior, and we have been able to foil atleast 20-25 percent untoward incidents through prompt and corrective measures.”

Vendor speak:
Sudhindra Holla, Country Manager, Axis Communications, the OEM partner for the project, adds, “According to us this is one of the best safe city projects that we have executed recently, and I would like to thank the MIPL and Samarth security systems integrator for this project, for the fair evaluation done at a very thorough proof of concept. I am personally very happy with the outcome of the project, because lot of projects that I have seen run into a road block somewhere and they are unable to get off the block even during implementation and it really can’t deliver what the end customer really wants. The concept what was mentioned on the paper is what the customer is really getting today, this is one of the best projects we have worked for.”

Future prospects:
Going forward, the Nanded police plans to gather information from social media and give a pre-alarm of the incidents, so the authorities can take preventive measures, Deshmukh informs.