City

CCTVs that don’t see

Cameras at blast site of little help to investigators; PMC to pump in additional Rs 1 cr for project

Dinesh Thite & Siddharth Gadkari

Posted On Friday, August 03, 2012 at 08:41:19 AM

On the entire stretch of the Jangli Maharaj Road and its vicinity there was one Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) camera zoomed in bang on the spot which eventually became the scene of the first low intensity explosion.

However, this camera was of little help both to the State and Central investigative agencies who have been sifting through lot to find clues which could lead them to the perpetrators of this crime.

• (Above) At Savarkar Chowk a lone traffic CCTV camera could not record the blast that could have been captured; (Below) machines at the Swargate CCTV control room reflect the general state of affairs

This lone rotating camera, recently installed by Pune Municipal Corporation mainly to study the traffic movement at the busy junction, was functioning at the time of the first blast near Balgandharva Rangmandir but was neither equipped to record the events below nor was being monitored by anyone.

The control room of this camera was the Veer Savarkar Bhavan office of Additional City Engineer Shriniwas Bonala, who is currently on leave.

The civic body installed more than 200 such cameras around the city, some in the wake of the German Bakery blasts in 2010 when citizens raised a hue and cry about the skeletal security and surveillance resources available at the disposal of the city police.

Although PMC has reportedly spent nearly Rs 17 crore on CCTV cameras, it has woefully failed to exploit its benefit to the hilt. Both the PMC and Pune’s police were uninterested in shouldering the responsibility of monitoring them.

The earlier cameras were a part of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) and facilitated photographing traffic offenders and were never intended to be used for surveillance, said a PMC official on the condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, PMC has once again decided to fork out another Rs 1 crore from its funds to augment the CCTV cameras. This decision was taken at an emergency meeting held at the PMC headquarters on Thursday where Mayor Vaishali Bankar, Deputy Mayor Deepak Mankar, leader of house Subhash Jagtap and Municipal Commissioner Mahesh Pathak discussed the need for more cameras in the wake of J M Road blasts.

The PMC has also decided that the contractor, to be appointed for installing the cameras, will be responsible for their operation and maintenance for three years. Thereafter, the civic body expects the city’s police force to take over the management of these surveillance cameras.

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