Police, CISF scan feed from over 500 cameras at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital
Telegraph | 7 November 2024
The city police and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) have started monitoring the feed from more than 500 CCTV cameras from the command control room that was set up at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital a few days back.
Senior officers of Kolkata Police said the feed from the 532 newly installed cameras and the 200-odd old ones are being received on separate sets of monitors in the control room on the ground floor of the Emergency building.
The new CCTV cameras were set up to boost security at the government medical college following the rape and murder of a junior doctor in a seminar room on the third floor of the Emergency building on August 9.
Bringing the entire RG Kar compound under electronic surveillance was one of the demands of the junior doctors who have been on a protest path across the state since the August 9 horror, pressing for urgent measures to secure their workplaces and improve their working conditions.
A room has been built on the RG Kar campus to accommodate a large server that can store the feed from the more than 700 cameras for 90 days.
Police officers said the recordings, from multiple angles, are being stored in a way that they can be easily retrieved by law-enforcement agencies by entering into the system certain specific details such as date, time and location.
“The cameras are just about everywhere now, including the entry and exit of each ward,” said a senior police officer. Work on installing another 200 cameras in the Emergency building has started following a nod from the CBI (the central agency is probing the rape and murder and alleged financial irregularities at RG Kar),” a senior official in the PWD’s electrical wing said.
The PWD is installing the surveillance cameras.
“Since officers from the law-enforcement agencies alone can’t scan all the feed, running into hundreds of hours, a second connection has been established for senior officials in the hospital administration to run a parallel monitoring,” said the official.
The state government has allotted ₹123 crore for upgrading the facilities and infrastructure across medical colleges and other hospitals, including RG Kar.
Senior PWD engineers said the cameras have been installed at the entry and exit of all the wards and the rooms for doctors and nurses.
“We have checked the electric connection and have ensured that all cameras are functional. Representatives of the hospital administration and police and CISF officers have been briefed on the functioning of the cameras,” a senior PWD engineer (electrical) said.
The police have proposed that baggage scanner counters be set up the entry to the RG Kar campus.
“Senior officers at the police headquarters in Lalbazar have gone through the proposal and are calculating the cost for setting up the facility,” an officer said.