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NEW: How Hyderabad became India's most surveilled city — one CCTV camera for every 20 citizens
My latest piece for @CodaStory is on how my hometown Hyderabad changed over the years from an IT hub to a city with excessive surveillance. https://bit.ly/2Qdv4Nk
My latest piece for @CodaStory is on how my hometown Hyderabad changed over the years from an IT hub to a city with excessive surveillance. https://bit.ly/2Qdv4Nk
Hyderabad's history with tech surveillance can be traced back to 2013 when after twin bombings in the city, the govt altered its Public Safety Act & made it compulsory for establishments to provide CCTV access to the cops. Since then the no. of CCTVs has risen to over 500,000.
The city has been using CCTVs to impose Covid-19 lockdown & the mandate of wearing a mask in public spaces. People who are caught not wearing one thru these cams are sent a ticket for Rs 1,000. As of July, 15k mask violators were fined, many of whom were caught using these cams.
Once a camera spots an individual without a face mask, it sends an image & alert to the command & control center at police headquarters in Hyderabad. The city is also in the process of building a 20 storey police hqrts which will house tech to process footage of 1L cams in 1 min.
Hyderabad has evolved over the years from being an IT Hub to now a centre of deployment for surveillance tech. The city was one of the first to use number plate recognition systems, facial recognition at airports and most recently drone-based surveillance.
The cops also have an app called TSCOP which lets them access the crime and criminal database to match images of people they click while patrolling. The state has also created their own database of citizens which is called as the "360 degree view of every citizen"
TS Police say that tech has helped reduce state's crime rate by 40% since 2014 & 99% of suspects are now apprehended within 24 hours of the crimes they are thot to have committed. Traffic congestion is down by 15% since 2017 & facial recognition was used to find missing people.
In Telangana, the government recently piloted facial recognition to identify voters during January’s local elections. Photographs of individuals were taken at polling booths and matched against voter ID cards or other official identification. https://bit.ly/2Q9Fo90
A UK-based firm recently came out with a report which named Hyderabad in the top 20 most surveilled cities in the world. The other city in this list was London and the rest 18 were cities in China. https://bit.ly/3aOJzR5
