Punjab Deputy Chief Minister, Sukhbir Badal, recently inaugurated the first phase of Safe City project, which is aimed at checking crime and ensuring smooth flow of traffic in Ludhiana. Inaugurating the project at Police Lines, Badal said the project has come up at a cost of Rs 80 crore and would be instrumental in ensuring safety of the people which is of paramount concern to the state government. He also informed that the surveillance system would be fully functional by December 20 which would also ease traffic problems besides keeping an eye on crimes in this industrial town.
Giving more details about the project, he said a total of 159 locales have been equipped with 1,442 CCTV cameras keeping a hawk’s eye on all the significant spots in the city with the control room at Police Lines. He said this project would go a long way in keeping the law and order situation under control. Badal maintained that by next year he believes that the project would be implemented in all the corporation towns of the state. The deputy chief minister also said that soon all the link roads, inside-outside points of the villages would also see the CCTV cameras being installed and would be connected with the district control room. He also claimed that Punjab would be the first state in the country where, in the next one and a half years, CCTV cameras would be installed in the entire state, at a cost of around Rs 500 crores, for the safety and security of citizens. Meanwhile, sources disclosed that besides delay, there were many bottlenecks in the project.
Already it has taken the authorities more than three years to start the first phase of the project that was announced in the budget speech by the finance minister in 2013. They added that even now, only 61 out of 169 spots where cameras are to be installed have been covered in the first stage of the project.
