New Delhi: Four years after it was decided that surveillance cameras will be installed in 983 railway stations in the country under the Nirbhaya Fund, the project has reportedly not met with success.
The Nirbhaya Fund was set up by the Union government after the brutal gangrape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012. The camera installation at stations was one of the many projects meant to enhance women’s safety put in place under the Fund.
However, according to The Hindu, not only has this project failed to take off, but the Central Vigilance Commission has raised serious improprieties during the tendering process. This has led the Ministry of Railways to ask its general managers to install video surveillance systems (VSS) at railway stations in their respective zones.
The VSS execution was originally supposed to be done by the public sector company RailTel, at an estimated cost of Rs 500 crore. The plan was to involve multiple agencies inside and outside the railways.
Though RailTel floated tenders for four regions in 2016, according to The Hindu, the project never took off, leading to a CVC inquiry. A detailed enquiry revealed that certain conditions in the tender document were “ambiguous”, the newspaper reports. The workings of the tender committee were also called into question.
“The Tender Committee was found to be working beyond their jurisdiction on certain parameters like testing of some of the items like switches in the laboratory of the firm and that too without covering all parameters prescribed in the tender documents… The overall supervision and control on the process was found to be lacking on the part of the Board level officers,” the System Improvement Report said according to The Hindu.
Meanwhile, the report says, some zones decided to carry out the project on their own and even floated tenders. “But it was later decided to ask RailTel to complete the work. It is not just the 983 stations but the installation of surveillance cameras in hundreds of other railway stations and thousands of coaches in premium trains. Only a detailed investigation by an independent agency can reveal why and how the whole project got derailed and at whose intervention,” an Indian Railways official told The Hindu.
In the years since this project was first announced, violence against women in trains has not reduced. This has led to some zones taking other initiatives to try and tackle the problem. The Central Railways zone, for instance, has launched an app where women can make complaints or report emergencies. The Bhopal division has decided to install CCTV cameras inside coaches after a woman was murdered inside a train.