Chennai Corporation To Now Install Smart Poles Across The City To Ensure Women’s Safety. They Will Be Equipped With Distress Signals And A Lot More.
“Better late than never”, a phrase that the government of our country seems to have sworn by in recent times, especially in terms of delivering on the promise of women’s safety, could now be the motto of our country that has always managed to operate by and only after devastating incident takes place – be it a Nirbhaya case or a Kathua rape case. For a country has a woman raped every 16 minutes, we are pretty laid back about protecting our women, or at least have been in the past. However, off late, with the rise in crime increasing by the day and in terms of brutality, a few state governments have come up with measures to preempt such crimes. Like Chennai, that has recently started installing smart poles across the city for women’s safety.
With features that allow women to send out a distress signal with the touch of button, enabling a loud hoot to alert others around the area, and also sending a message to the nearest police station, these smart poles are touted to be the saviours for women walking the streets with the constant fear of being attacked.
The smart poles are going to be installed in about 1600 locations across the city by the year 2021, the money for this project and initiative to keep women safe is going to be taken out of the Nirbhaya fund, costing them close to 100 crores. To ensure feasibility and a successful response for these efforts, the civic body and the police is taking note of all the areas that are said to be the most vulnerable for women during the day and night. The Greater Chennai Corporation is calling these as the safe zone clusters.
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The poles are also to be equipped with surveillance cameras and cameras with fisheye lenses which would get activated and start taking pictures of the scene, for gathering evidence and later helping in catching a perpetrator. A senior officer said, “These photos will help the police to identify the wrong-doer by matching with their database as well.”
Besides these features, the smart poles will be enabled with 4G connectivity to that will help in sending across a live feed to the police when and if required. Upon pressing the distress signal, the poles will also emit a light of 40watts different in colour of the street light, to express caution to everyone else around, who would then alert the authorities or jump in to help.
By the looks of it, these poles do seem to be equipped with a lot of features to help keep the women safe, but considering so many previous such initiatives have been stopped in their tracks or failed to deliver, we wouldn’t be keeping our hopes too high with this one. However, it still stands as an incredible initiative, at such a great scale too, to help safeguard the interest of women.
