Now, 500 Chennai buses will have panic buttons to report discomfort, threats

CHENNAI: Passengers in the city buses need not be at the mercy of bus drivers and conductors to report discomfort and safety threats on board. Soon, they might be able to report threats and get the law enforcement agencies attending to their problems with just a push of a button on board the bus. Yes. The Tamil Nadu government on Saturday launched the Artificial Intelligence enabled panic button cum CCTV surveillance project for the city buses.

Chief Minister M K Stalin has launched CCTV camera and panic button facilities in 500 buses for women and children’s safety under Nirbhaya safe city project at a function attended by State Transport Minister S S Sivasankar in the Secretariat this morning.

Under the project, each bus would be fitted with three cameras, four panic buttons and AI (artificial intelligence) enabled Mobile Network Video Recorder (MNVR). The MNVR would be linked to the Cloud based control centre via 4G GSM SIM service. The entire system would be networked with the data centre and cloud besides being monitored from the Integrated Command and Control Centre of MTC. Discomforts caused to passengers by fellow passengers and safety threats to women could be recorded by pressing the panic button, a statement issued by the state government said.

As soon as the panic button is pressed, an alarm would be raised at the control centre along with a video grab. Alert by the alarm, the operator at the control centre will facilitate the next course of action after monitoring the situation. The control centre would be linked with the distress response centre of the city police and Chennai Corporation. The system has been designed to forward distress calls to the police control room on a real time basis.

As a part of the project, 31 bus depots and 35 bus terminuses of MTC have been brought under the surveillance of the control centre, where AI based processing/review of videos would be done. The project would help detect missing persons and identify criminals besides facilitating various other works of the Chennai Corporation, transport department and the state police. The Chief Minister also gave away appointment orders to over 200 persons recruited on compassionate grounds by the State Transport Department.