Hyderabad has the most CCTV surveillance in India and is among the top 20 most surveilled cities in the world. In its annual report, UK-based Comparitech, a firm that reviews technology services like VPN, antivirus and apps, found that the capital city of Telangana ranked 16 globally, and was one of two non-Chinese cities listed.
According to the report’s rankings, China carried out the most surveillance, with 18 out of the top 20 most surveilled being Chinese. The city of Taiyuan ranked at the top with 4,65,255 CCTV cameras. The city is home to 3,891,127 people. This puts the security cameras to population ratio at 119.57 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people. The city has a crime index of 51.47. Hyderabad came up 15 spots behind with 3 lakh CCTV cameras being used to keep tabs on a city that has a population of a little over 1 crore. This means there are 29.99 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people, the report said. The crime index in the Indian city is at 43.46.
The other Indian cities that were listed included Chennai at 21 and Delhi ranked at 33.
Further, it found no correlation between the number of publicly installed CCTV surveillance cameras and the level of crime and safety in a city. This means in some cities there is an unjustified number of CCTV cameras set up in public spaces to monitor people with little reason.
The report noted that most of the heaviest surveilled cities aren’t in the top 20 most populated cities. In its analysis of cities with higher population with lesser cameras, it cited Delhi as an example. The city has 4,29,500 cameras for an overall population of 30,290,396. This means the national capital has 14.18 cameras per 1,000 people, which is less than Hyderabad’s. Delhi’s crime index score was higher than Hyderabad’s at 58.69.
Mumbai, another city which has more people than Hyderabad, has only 0.48 cameras per 1,000 people.
