Amid growing incidents of attacks on toll plaza staff, National Highways Authority of India is planning to link CCTV systems at toll plazas on National Highway-2, one of the longest in the country, with local police control rooms. The first one of these, Mahuvan toll plaza, situated close to Agra-Mathura district border, some 165 km from the national capital, started providing live CCTV feed to the police control room recently.
Last month, over a dozen men were arrested for vandalising toll booths on DND Flyway in Noida. Nearly 100 protesters demanding a ban on the movie Padmaavat had come to the toll plaza on bikes and cars, and created pandemonium for nearly half-an-hour. The goons then manhandled some guards who tried to stop them.
Anil Kumar Singh, manager of Mahuvan toll plaza, said, “This is the country’s first toll to provide live feed to a police control room. We were approached by inspector general (Agra range) Raja Srivastava a couple of months ago and he mooted the idea to conduct real-time surveillance the at toll plaza. Going live not only helped us tackle unruly persons at toll booths, it also helped police in tracing the criminals.”
Mohammad Safi, deputy general manager of NHAI (Mathura), said, “The live surveillance system was installed one month back.” He added that the results have been encouraging.
IG (Agra range) Raja Srivastava said, “The live surveillance system is vital as it helps us trace and locate criminals crossing the inter-district border. Apart from that, such footage creates a sense of fear among unruly men and forces them to behave with the toll staff.”
Every month, over 5.5 lakh vehicles cross Mahuvan toll plaza on NH2, which connects the national capital with eastern parts of India, via Agra, Firozabad, Etawah, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi and goes up to Kolkata.
