Ludhiana: Command centre to track protests, demolitions next

LUDHIANA: The integrated command and control centre (ICCC) at the MC’s zone D in Sarabha Nagar has started live monitoring of traffic using the CCTV cameras and is due to add more public safety features. On Wednesday, the MC officials showed Punjab Municipal Infrastructure Development Company (PMIDC) chief executive officer Isha Kalia around the centre and told her about the upcoming features.
Besides observing traffic, the centre does surveillance of the city markets, controls the street lights and rooftop solar energy panels, tracks the garbage trucks and fire tenders with global positioning system (GPS), monitors revenue collection, and assesses sanitation complaints. The MC claims that the system has performed positively, so far, and now it will start keeping an eye on protest, demolition, defacement, and fire (with vehicle-mounted cameras), besides doing night surveillance.
Encroachments and defacement have become a big issue in the city. Miscreants have spoiled the city walls with graffiti and the municipal corporation, so the MC required to track them, while it also needed a reliable attendance system that could be controlled from a mobile-phone application.
The officials claimed some of the services in the planning stage included monitoring of the tehbazari wing, weekly markets, stray animals, air quality and pollution levels, and household collection of revenue. For now, the centre relies on 1,401 CCTV cameras.