Ahmedabad: AMC's surveillance to get costlier

The civic body's digital surveillance project, which includes maintenance of 6,500-odd CCTVs and their IT systems across the city, is getting costlier by the year.

At present, the cost of operation and maintenance is Rs 10 crore a year.

Now, the cost to the Ahmedabad Smart City Company (ASCC) of a three-year maintenance contract is expected to cost more than Rs 53 crore, the base price.

Seven years ago, ASCC had allotted work to a private company to begin installing 6,500 CCTV cameras across the city under the Safe and Secure Ahmedabad (SASA) project for a cost of Rs 239 crore. In March, this contract for operations and maintenance is coming to an end.

So far, an average of Rs 10 crore was spent every year on CCTV operations and maintenance, but this is expected to increase to about Rs 17 crore to Rs 20 crore.

This is mainly because of upgradation of technology, wear and tear of hardware and installation of new licensed software.

The AMC and city police together invested Rs 314 crore under SASA to cover 130 junctions with CCTV surveillance to enforce "zero tolerance" traffic zones.

There were 126 digital display boards installed, a command control centre was set up on 2,300 square metres in Paldi at a cost of Rs 9.16 crore.

So far, under this project, Rs 62 crore has been spent on creating IT infrastructure while 1,576 data points were connected to BSNL's lines.

Biometric RFID access control, a high-end HVAC system and CCTV surveillance system were also launched at the command and control centre.

AMC and city police were coordinating for collection of e-memo fines under the project.