Now Reading: Gujarat Police launch hackathon to unify 80,000 CCTV cameras
-
01
Gujarat Police launch hackathon to unify 80,000 CCTV cameras
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…
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.
Source: hindustantimes.com
This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
