Bhopal Eye Lends Vision To Control Crime

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): From tracing notorious criminals to keeping an eye on suspicious people, Bhopal eye is helping police in controlling crimes and cracking cases of thefts, murders and abductions.

The initiative was started to take help of citizens in controlling crimes while covering the dark spots that are not covered under cameras installed under Smart City project.

Police officials have launched drive to encourage individuals especially traders, residential welfare societies to install CCTV cameras in their localities.

And it is yielding results. Sahil Lala, a mobile snatcher, was nabbed by Ayodhya Nagar police through CCTV surveillance a week back.

A month back, an unidentified man stole cash and valuables from the house of crime branch inspector Ashok Maravi.

The accused deliberately used different routes and streets and even lanes but police traced the escape route of thief through the CCTV cameras registered in Bhopal eye app and nabbed him.

“CCTV cameras installed under ITMS along with those registered in Bhopal eye App are helping police cracking majority of cases, which is 90%. The cases include blind murders, abductions, thefts and snatchings along with figuring out negligence of drivers in road accidents,” Additional DCP (crime) Shailendra Singh Chauhan said.

According to police records, Misrod has highest number of private CCTV cameras, 649 to be precise. Of them, 264 are registered with Bhopal eye.

The Bhopal eye

Bhopal eye app can be downloaded in the mobile phone by individuals willing to share the live feeds of their CCTV cameras with police. After registration of owner’s name, address and other details, the link of internet-enabled cameras can be shared with police, which will give them access to monitoring the live feed and keeping an eye on the locality.

Police will only monitor the activities in the concerned localities without violating privacy of individuals.

Vital statistics

With 2000 cameras installed under ITMS, police also has access to 1890 private CCTV cameras registered through ‘Bhopal eye’ App. Highest number of registered private cameras are 552 in Zone-3 and second highest is 494 in Zone-2. Zone-4 has 477 private CCTVs registered while Zone-1 only has 298 private registered cameras as per the data till November, 2024. Moreover, Bhopal police has 7601 camera locations across all four zones and Bhopal rural.

Scope for improvement

Bhopal rural lags behind in installation of private cameras. As per records, only 69 private cameras were registered with ‘Bhopal eye’ with 448 camera locations across all rural police stations. The highest registered cameras are 22 in Bairasiya area.