Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah has given the green light to Rs. 5.5 billion agreement between Sindh Police and National Radio and Telecommunications Corporation (NRTC) for the inaugural phase of Smart Safe City Project in Red Zone in Karachi.
The red zone includes CM House, Governor House and their surrounding areas in Saddar. It took the Sindh government almost eight years to fund this project, which was planned and launched in 2016.The approval of the agreement came during a meeting at CM House attended by Home Minister Zia Lanjar, Mayor Karachi Murtaza Wahab, Chief Secretary Asif Hyder Shah, IG Police Riffat Mukhtar and Brigadier General Asim Ishaque of NRTC, Sindh, Safe Cities Authority Director General Asif Aijaz. Shaikh and other officials.
It was announced at the meeting that the Smart Safe City project envisages the installation of 1,300 CCTV cameras at 300 locations in the red zone and airport corridor, equipped with the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) function and supported by solar energy become. . Battery backup powered in eight hours. In addition, a 193-kilometer fiber optic cable network would connect 18 police stations. The cameras would be linked to the command and control center of the Central Police Office, with plans to set up a permanent C&CC at the Karachi Police Office.
The Smart Safe City project aims to integrate facial and license plate recognition systems.It facilitates monitoring hospitals for criminals/suspects, tracking multiple cameras against suspects, coordinating responses, managing crime databases and integrating with national databases.
The Prime Minister expressed his enthusiasm and stated that the long-awaited project was finally bearing fruit and expressed hope that it would achieve its objectives. He urged the NRTC to expedite the first phase and complete it in 18 months instead of the planned 24 months.
The CM stressed the urgent need for such initiatives and highlighted Karachi's growing population, which is expected to cross 20.38 million by 2030.Fighting crime, dealing with critical incidents, maintaining public order, dealing with disasters and ensuring road safety were identified as top priorities and technological integration was seen as the key to their solution.
The conceptual framework of Smart Safe City Karachi includes rapid emergency response, digital forensics, incident analysis, situational awareness through centralized operations, real-time monitoring, systematic traffic and crowd management, rapid incident response and intelligent correlation of data from various databases.
In August 2023, CM Shah launched an integrated safe city project “based on C5ISR”. C5ISR stands for Command, Control, Communication, Computing, Cybersecurity, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. Officials say the new contract between the NRTC and the Sindh Safe Cities Authority is “a kind of implementation” of the same soft launch.