# Gujarat Police launch hackathon to unify 80,000 CCTV cameras 2026-08-25T19:43:50+00:00 | Governance | Indian Opinion Desk Corroboration: 1 independent outlet The Gujarat Police have announced a hackathon to integrate over 80,000 CCTV cameras across the state into a single smart surveillance network. The event, scheduled for September 10-11 at iHub Gujarat in Ahmedabad, carries a prize pool of Rs 37 lakh and is open to students, researchers, startups and companies. Participants will develop AI-based solutions for real-time suspicious activity detection, automatic number plate recognition, vehicle tracking and watchlist matching. The system must integrate feeds from diverse cameras, cross-reference them with government databases and generate real-time alerts for law enforcement. Advocate Punit Juneja of the Gujarat High Court cautioned that a system of this scale raises serious privacy concerns, calling for clear legal safeguards on access, data retention and facial recognition. A core team will oversee integration, with a dedicated command centre monitoring the network. ## Indian Opinion Analysis India's public CCTV expansion has outpaced its privacy framework: the Personal Data Protection Bill, passed in 2023, grants the government broad exemptions for surveillance without individual consent. Gujarat's project would dwarf existing city-level command centres such as Delhi's 2,700-camera network or Hyderabad's 8,000-camera system. The hackathon's live-test phase, using 50 cameras to track a single vehicle, is a small-scale proof of concept, but scaling to 80,000 cameras would require handling petabytes of video data daily, a technical and financial challenge even for state-run infrastructure. No state has yet integrated this many cameras into a single AI analytics platform, so this project could set the national template for police surveillance architecture. ## Coverage - hindustantimes.com Leads with police announcement and hackathon details, includes advocate's privacy warning without editorialising. This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above. Tags: Ahmedabad, Gujarat government, Gujarat Police, iHub Gujarat Canonical: https://indianopinion.org/gujarat-police-launch-hackathon-to-unify-80000-cctv-cameras/ License: Summary and commentary (c) Indian Opinion, reusable with attribution. Facts belong to the linked sources. Cite: https://indianopinion.org/gujarat-police-launch-hackathon-to-unify-80000-cctv-cameras/#story-in-brief Review state: restored archive article, accurate at time of publication, not offered to search indexes. How this brief was made: an AI model read the report linked above and wrote this summary and analysis, which were published automatically. Published briefs are sampled every hour by an automated quality check; the editor verifies its findings and approves corrections, and corrected briefs carry a dated correction line. We do no original reporting. Methodology: https://indianopinion.org/ai-use-policy/