Many have been criticising the GCP or Greater Chennai Police for using the outdated or old gadgets. Now, GCP has floated a tender this week to modernise the Chennai city surveillance system.
The Union Ministry has approved funds for the TN under the police forces modernisation scheme & the GCP has now revived the Mega City Police Project. An amount of Rs 380 crores has been released by the Centre to the TN police between 2014-15 and 2019-20.
Point is that a portion of the amount has not been used. As TN did not submit the utilisation certificates, the financial aid was stopped. The documents have clearly mentioned that the money was used only for the intended purpose. For this financial year, the home ministry has sanctioned Rs 44 crores to the state.
It was mentioned by Mr. Shankar Jiwal, commissioner of Chennai that these years a portion of funds from Centre was unutilised. The project was revived last year and many high end equipment like GPS kits for patrol vehicles would be procured. It is worthy to note that the Chennai city police would be buying 750 vehicle tracking devices under this project. In addition, as many as 2900 surveillance cameras and 7 drone units etc would also be procured.
The output feed could be monitored from a master control room at the Police commissioners office in Vepery. The monitoring work could also be done at 7 mobile command control centres too. The newly purchased cameras would be installed in the already identified 1025 locations in Chennai.