India's 'Google Earth' to curb crime

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Keywords: Old Delhi, Surveillance

New Delhi: India’s own version of Google Earth is in the offing! If things go according to plan, the project could be a reality in just about a year’s time.

Modeled on the hugely-popular Google mapping engine, the project is waiting a go-ahead from the Union Cabinet.

The Science and Technology Ministry has already launched a pilot project of this technology in the Chandini Chowk area of Old Delhi.

In the first phase, live cameras will cover a 20-sq-km area, and the three-dimensional surveillance system – called Geographical Information System or GIS – will be used to trace all kinds of illegal activities; from civic lawlessness to traffic snarls and much more.

In one such instance, the surveillance cameras recently caught an illegal construction in the Chandini Chowk area.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi now plans to use these cameras to record all constructions that deviate from the norms – the building of an extra floor, for instance – and catch them in the act.

“It’s time to move from human discretion to technological precision and to use technology for good governance,” Kapil Silbal, Science and Technology Minister, says.

If the project, estimated to cost of Rs 3 crore, gets the ‘go ahead’, high-resolution satellite imagery for the whole of Delhi will be available by 2008.

However, to avoid controversies like the ones Google Earth is encountering, the imagery involving sensitive installations will be kept out of public domain.

The project promises to open up new avenues for the prosecution in criminal cases. Cameras mounted on cars will soon be keeping a close watch on arson and riot-like situations and all the photographs recorded this way will later be used as evidence against the miscreants.

And what the cameras with a five-km depth and three-D vision can achieve in traffic management works can only be left to imagination.

On the flip side, the fear of privacy being intruded could prove a hiccup to the implementation of the project. The proponents of the system, however, say the benefits of the system are far too many to be mired in a privacy debate.