By TwoCircles.net staff reporter
New Delhi: If you are in the Walled City area of the national capital and want to do some nonsense, be ware; a third eye is watching you. Nothing in open in the area, heavily populated by Muslims, is hidden from the government as it has planted some high range and high-powered cameras there.
The government says that it has set the surveillance cameras to check illegal activities and illegal construction. But the local residents had suspected the real motive behind the move. Some Urdu newspapers raised the issue; so to clarify the position Union Minister Kapil Sibal whose science and technology ministry had come up with the idea took some reporters to the control room in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi from where the information gathered by the cameras are restored and sent to concerned departments, says a report in the Urdu daily Hamara Samaj. Sibal represents Chandni Chowk constituency in the Lok Sabha.
The cameras based on 3-D GIS system was introduced to the county by Sibal’s ministry in October 2006 and three such cameras were planted in the Walled City area in December 2007: one on LIC building on Asif Ali Road, another on Kasturba Gandhi Hospital and one on a tower in Urdu Park. In daytime their range is 5 km and at night 2 km. So powerful are these cameras that they can capture any trouble on road or streets like electricity failure or electricity theft, waterlogging in lanes, leakage of water pipeline and fire.
Sibal maintained that the technology can play a key role in combating terrorism in the country.
Why was this area chosen for the experiment of the technology? The minister said this is a thickly populated area, so it is difficult to predict illegal activities here.
Asked if such cameras have been planted in other areas in Delhi, he said the responsibility of the central government and his ministry was to introduce the project to the state government. The responsibility of its implementation is on the state government.