Siliguri police control room

Purkayastha inaugurates the control room. Picture by Passang Yolmo

BIRESWAR BANERJEE, TT, Mar 17, 2018, Siliguri: The Siliguri Metropolitan Police opened its first integrated control room for better control of crime and traffic across the city and its adjacent areas on Friday.

Surajit Kar Purkayastha, the director general of police, inaugurated the control room at Siliguri police station here.

The control room will be operational round the clock with 115 cameras, including 10 automatic number plate reader (ANPR) installed at different locations of the city.

"The new integrated police control room will function for overall surveillance and detection of crime, traffic and enforcement of traffic rules. This is part of chief minister Mamata Banerjee's much appreciated 'Safe Drive, Save Live' programme. We had earlier introduced such surveillance systems in Calcutta, Howrah and Bidhannagar. Some more districts will get such facilities. We are also planning to set 100 watch towers on the different important stretches of national highways across the state," the DG said.

Sources in the SMP said there were two major entry and exit points of the city where the ANPRs had been installed. These cameras will be linked with the police control room through special software and new gadget will become helpful for tracking any vehicle's number, driver of which will try to flee from the city after committing any traffic violation or crime.

"With this new surveillance system, we will manage to cover total 31 traffic points of the SMP area. Some more cameras will be installed soon and then, we will cover 22 more such junctions," said Sunil Yadav, the deputy commissioner of police (traffic), said.