Smiling? You are on camera! Did that catch you off-guard? Well, it shouldn’t.
Were you aware of the excessive amount of cameras capturing your movements and moments of your daily life? The surveillance state is no longer a myth but a growing reality in our nation today.
There is a growing concern about surveillance mechanisms intermingling with our daily lives. There is also an abundance of concern about the way that surveillance, through traffic management and other systems, has shot up in different cities around the country. Many questions arise, are we doing surveillance to catch the bad guy, or to become a state that is an overlord overall? Questions such as our individual right to privacy and storage of data, as well as the consent of citizens on this exercise, are potent factors to be aware of and critically process.
The Smart City Mission
The Smart City Mission, by the government of India, was a major push into digitalizing cities, as well as changing different ecosystems to adjust for modernization and growth. One such development from the Smart City Mission has been the immediate increase in surveillance systems around cities where the Smart City Mission has been initiated. Odisha is no stranger to this meteoric rise. Considering Bhubaneswar’s top spot on the initial list of the Smart City Mission has led to this new surveillance state mechanism.
Officially termed the “National Smart Cities Mission”, the initiative involved 100 cities taking a poll position in different states of the country vying for modernization and quick development through heavy investment made by the government mechanism. These included the development of public infrastructure, modernizing policing, sanitation, and other priority industries. The project launched in 2015, had a budget of ₹720,000 crore (US$90 billion), that sought an inspired change in different cities.
Nearly a decade down the line, there are many more questions than answers as to the success of the objectives that were loftily set by the Smart Cities bodies. There has been progress in areas such as surveillance, and massive redevelopment of policing mechanisms, but are these all for the benefit of the general population? Granted, security is an important state concern, but to what degree do these security mechanisms grant any sense of public confidence?
There have been major additions in the infrastructure of CCTV cameras, and HD cameras in road networks and buildings and connecting them into a smart grid for surveillance purposes. Yet, do these translate to the reduction of crime? Or, do these always keep their mandate of protection? The state in itself by principle, records, and stores various data points on our movements vehicularly through this system.
The recent push in many states for High-Security Number Plates (HSNP’s), is for these management systems to take the ID tags of the vehicles and track vehicular movements. While the requirement for protection and maintaining civil order are key ingredients that are important for us, where do we achieve a balance? Do these cameras stop recording when there are pedestrian movements, definitely not.
Do these cameras that capture areas that have individual dwellings or other activities that have nothing to do with vehicle security respect your individual privacy? Most likely, no. These questions are principally raising eyebrows in different domains. If the state can now track you, know where you have been and where you are moving towards, to what degree can the state intercede with your private lives?
Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited, And The Smart City
Each city that came on the list of 100 created a special-purpose vehicle that addressed and implemented all the new programs in the cities. Bhubaneswar created the – Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) for all the projects associated with Bhubaneswar. There were lofty goals for achieving many projects in all the smart cities by 2020, yet as is the pace with infrastructure development in India, there is a lot of stagnancy in projects, as well as a lot of cost overruns and delays.
The elusiveness and fanfare, yet little bark on these fronts are not a myth, but a steady reality. Raising more eyebrows than providing answers for the success of the Smart City initiatives. Are our smart cities achieving all of their goals? Probably not. Yet on the fronts like surveillance, as we highlight above, there are some interesting statistics that can be seen.
Bhubaneswar’s And India’s Smart Surveillance Problem
Let us focus on the Bhubaneswar surveillance grid. In a short span of time, from little public surveillance infrastructure, the state has made huge inroads in the implementation of these systems. Our cops in the city man these systems. While these systems can Automatically Record Number Plates now, there are a whole lot of new developments that are at the forefront of our attention and need for discussions as a citizen in the state. Cities are no strangers to surveillance, global statistics indicate the incessant growth of surveillance activities that are carried out.
These CCTV cameras are processing, churning out, and storing data at a tremendous rate. Unbeknownst to many in the country, India ranks high in the number of cameras per 1000 people, and per square mile, for many of the top spots, following China. Many Indian cities have surveillance architectures that are massively spread across the cities to capture every morsel of movement and picture it could.
Growing Surveillance Mechanisms In Smart Cities
Are smart cities following the suit of Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Indore, and Chennai? Well, yes. Indore’s smart city project is a testament to the same. Not just public infrastructure surveillance encouraged and developed, but private homeowners in Indore have also gotten directives for new surveillance systems. Bhubaneswar cops are also now in charge of their new surveillance mechanisms.
Many reports last year, peg the current installations of CCTV cameras to 600 across 159 different locations as part of the city’s surveillance push. Initially, the CCTC feed was fed into BSCL and now runs across to the DCP office around the clock. These 600 cameras, were installed above the existing 130 cameras across the cities. Previously these mechanisms were in dire need of repair, but after the modernization and push by city officials buoyed by the investments in the network, these cameras are now visibly everywhere across the city.
Police report the need for 5000 surveillance cameras to cover the entirety of the city, which certainly realms into a skyrocketing figure. The main purpose, or the tagline, is to police crime, but these boundaries can easily be transgressed. Year after year, the reported number of cameras is increasing, with a mix of speed violation detection, CCTV coverage, advanced optical features, the capacities of those behind these screens, and the technological prowess is certainly mind-boggling. Let us look at this project not just from the public eye.
While many institutions are getting access to this system, private contracts are also allowing an incessant increase in the surveillance state. In Bhubaneswar for example, Honeywell had been given the initial contract. On these fronts then, there can be a growing concern about data breaches, liability for data breaches, and restoration of rights that various individuals have.
Where Next And Should We Worry?
There has been a significant shift in the Right to Privacy conversation in India. After multiple supreme court judgments in the same field, the common population has become more aware. Yet, there are many avenues that are left to explore in this field. As we have seen within states that have lower rates of education, and also lower socio-economic developments, economic and social exploitations still run rampant.
On top of these very issues, the growing tech boom in the world has created new monsters that are harder to detect, and even harder to deal with. The smart city initiative in Bhubaneswar has seen a catastrophic increase in surveillance, mirroring many Indian cities, and cities globally as well. Monitoring becomes an escape from necessity when ease of access, accountability, and privacy are intrinsically affected. There are a lot of issues that we discuss which we as a community need awareness about, and to make it an issue we remain vocal about and adamant to detest.