Quarantine wards in at least four hospitals and one hotel in Uttarakhand’s Dehradun, are being surveilled round the clock using a CCTV surveillance system, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs said in a statement. The system uses AI-based face recognition, and video feeds collected from CCTV cameras will be stored at the Integrated Command and Control Centre set up by Dehradun Smart City Limited (DSCL).
CCTV cameras have been installed at Doon, Coronation, Gandhi Shatabdi and Subharti hospitals, and Taqgene hotel to conduct the surveillance. The ministry hasn’t clarified the security measures being taken to protect the biometric data collected by the surveillance system.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Gujarat-based Scanpoint Geomatics, and Dehradun-based Webline were involved in the implementation of the surveillance system. It isn’t clear what roles each of these companies played individually in deploying the surveillance tool.
Scanpoint Geomatics has also developed an Android application called IGiS Geo-Locator, which is reportedly being used by officials in Dehradun to monitor quarantined people. The app allows officials to centrally monitor the live location of patients or suspects kept under quarantine. The company claims that the app creates a virtual geofence around a patient’s quarantine location, and alerts authorities in case they move away from the geofenced area.
