Nagpur: The city's much-hyped electronic eye is virtually blind. Of the 3,680 CCTV cameras installed under the Nagpur Smart City Project, more than 1,.
Nagpur: The city's much-hyped electronic eye is virtually blind. Of the 3,680 CCTV cameras installed under the Nagpur Smart City Project, more than 1,000 are completely defunct, leaving the entire surveillance network rickety, severely compromising public safety, traffic enforcement, and even national security hotspots. According to police sources, only 2,611 cameras are technically listed as "functional". Of these, just 2,213 are actually live and transmitting footage, while 398 remain offline despite being physically intact. In reality, the situation is far worse, as only 1,075 cameras are fully functioning. As many as 731 are declared defunct, and police admit that for the last 3 months, barely 2,200 cameras were online at any given time. The remaining cameras are either dead, damaged, or disconnected. The crippling blow is the total stoppage of AI-powered features that once made these cameras a game-changer. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), red-light violation detection, and red-light jumping alerts — all critical to traffic policing and crime investigation — stopped functioning entirely. "Without these two features, the cameras lost their importance," a senior police officer requesting anonymity. "They are now just ordinary video recorders that rarely work," the officer added. The fallout is visible across the city. The police struggle to gather evidence as street crimes surge. Traffic chaos at busy junctions goes unchecked because violators know the cameras are ineffective. The worst illustration came during last year's Maha riots. As live CCTV footage was unavailable, investigators relied on shaky mobile videos and private cameras. Several rioters were granted bail, and many cases are now on the verge of collapse in court. "We could make some arrests only with whatever manual evidence we could muster," an officer involved in the probe revealed. Sources stated that the RSS headquarters, Hedgewar Bhavan, and several other key institutional sites fall under the same dysfunctional network. Senior officials are privately worried that any untoward incident at these locations would leave investigators without crucial visual proof, exactly as happened in Mahal last year. Sources stated that the police are now forced to deploy additional manpower of homeguards for traffic control and crime prevention — a costly and inefficient arrangement in the city. Repeated appeals to the civic authorities and Nagpur Smart and Sustainable City Development Corporation Limited yielded little action, sources said. Sources said repair work is sporadic, and the AI software contract lapsed without renewal. Meanwhile, the defunct cameras continue to gather dust, their lenses covered in grime, while the city remains dangerously exposed.
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