the goan I network
PANAJI
In a move that will raise serious privacy concerns, The Imagine Panaji Smart City Development has floated tenders to install a Rs 180 crore worth “Goa Intelligent City Management System” that through a network of more than 450 CCTV cameras will watch “everybody all the time” within public areas of the city.
Officials of the Imagine Panaji Smart City Development have boasted “you will be amazed to see the kind and quality of data on citizens that we can generate” and that people will now be better behaved since “now there will be a feeling of being watched” and the system “will solve the problem of black spots in the city.”
The system which has currently found four bidders -- BSNL, L&T, NEC, Japan and Honeywell -- who are currently demonstrating their working models at a smaller scale -- will have several components the most important of which is surveillance.
According to former MLA of Panaji Siddharth Kuncaliencar the surveillance cameras which will be installed right from Old Goa to Dona Paula and including Cujira will be able to track movements of vehicles as well as people across the city and thereby catch traffic violators, which an automatic snapping up of the number plate, and intimation to the police as well as “suspicious movement” of people as a preemptive system rather than a postmortem as is currently the CCTV practise.
“A wanted character if he is noticed, the alert will automatically go to the police. This provision of a preemptive system is there in the system,” Kuncaliencar announced.
“You can even have facial recognition so that not just for criminals, but if a child is unfortunately misplaced, you can check which camera is capturing the child’s face and that information can be relayed to the cops,” Swayan Chaudhury CEO of the Imagine Panaji Smart City Mission said.
The “smart system” which will primarily depend on data gathered by the cameras will also help in “route optimization” and if there is a traffic problem along one particular route the traffic can be automatically “smartly diverted” along with an alternate route.
Besides the cameras, the system which is to be installed within eight months of the successful bidder being decided will also have a series of sensors along parking lots so that residents can “through an app automatically get notified over where the vacant parking spaces are.”
“At present, there are more than 4,000 parking slots in the city but they are not being properly managed and hence people cannot find parking. This all will be a thing of the past,” Kuncaliencar announced.
The system will also have “smart traffic” signals that will change not according to prefixed times but according to how many vehicles are at the junction from which direction.
More than traffic, the system is also expected to help with the garbage management system and inform the authorities over which areas garbage needs to be collected, which public bins are overflowing and residents through their smartphone app can tell, whether their garbage has been collected from their doorstep or not.
“In this way, we want to increase the efficiency of municipal systems,” Kuncaliencar said.
The project is currently at the technical evaluation stage where each of the four bidders is demonstrating their working models which will be examined by a committee of experts and finally there will be the opening of the tenders after which the lowest bidder will be selected.
Not just that, the authorities have said that the system will soon be installed in all other cities of Goa since “Goa is too small a place to have a different system for each city.”
