SW&C PROVIDES A SMART EDGE TO MITIGATE A GLOBAL CRISIS
New-age technology is playing a crucial role in the fight against COVID-19, empowering frontline warriors and essential service providers to monitor and control its spread. A phased battle across India that began with concentrated efforts, has now become more citycentric with L&T’s Smart World & Communication (SW&C) Business leading the charge with a range of customized smart solutions to arm city administrators.
R. SRINIVASAN
Executive Vice President & Head, Smart World & Communication
Whenever the country has faced a crisis, L&T has been at the forefront and in these critical times, we have been leading the fight against the pandemic with our smart solutions and technologies. With the entire nation locked down, it was imperative to maintain connectivity, augment our solution offerings to analyse data – for the central and local administrations to stay connected with the citizens to ensure continuous & relevant communication and to empower them for monitoring and decision making. Our engineers and on-field service personnel have been working round the clock to ensure seamless functioning of various solutions and systems across cities. Even as the situation has been evolving and fresh requirements are being articulated by our clients, we have been constantly adapting ourselves and realigning our personnel and solution offerings to meet these emerging needs. Our ability to seamlessly integrate futuristic technology solutions based on specific client requirements reinforces our credibility as a premium player in the smart world and communication domain delivering to our value proposition of being Master Systems Integrators.
Nagpur police team in MSV during surveillance
Transforming CCCs / COCs into War Rooms
Working with speed, hi-tech Command and Control Centres (CCC) and City Operation Centres (COC) constructed by SW&C across 23 cities under the Smart City Mission have been transformed into full-fledged war rooms, that have been the mainstay in this battle over the last 3 months.
Nagpur’s Municipal Commissioner visits the COC daily to monitor hotspots and interacts with citizens to address their requirements. “Even most of his media interactions are at the COC,” mentions Project Manager, Ajay Kumar Ramteke. “Ours is a 24/7 responsibility and some 70 of our team members are on essential duty round the clock to ensure maximum uptime for all solutions. We also share vital information and statistics such as analytics on lockdown zones, vehicle movement and crowd gathering to the police department and host emergency mobile applications as and when requested by the municipality reducing crowd gathering by 15% and considerably easing on-field surveillance.”
Hon’ble Municipal Commissioner has made the COC as a war room and has live interactions with the citizens of Nagpur
“Ours is a 24/7 responsibility and some 70 of our team members are on essential duty round the clock to ensure maximum uptime for all solutions.”
Ajay Kumar Ramteke
Project Manager, Nagpur Smart City
Leading operations at the Nagpur COC is Vironi Khandagle and her team of Priyanka and Momin Subur, working in two 12 hours shifts. Their scope is critical involving central management of all public announcements, monitoring of CCTVs and ensuring cyber security check across all IT systems. “We have specific audio tracks recorded by the Nagpur Municipal Commissioner and the Traffic Police giving instructions and guidance on preventive measures that we relay across 112 Public Address Systems,” informs Vironi, “plus 8 key notices or slides and 1 video across the city through 51 VMDs.”
“The executive dashboard made by our applications team has hugely helped the administrators in their tracking and zoning initiatives.”
Atmaram Magar
Project Manager, Pune Smart City
Shadab Ahmad, always a field man, is the ‘go to’ man these days for all field operations related tasks. With the police using 5 Mobile Surveillance Vehicles (MSV) extensively to monitor important areas, the services of Shabad and team are most sought after. “Managing the MSVs and ensuring that the WI-FI is working is critical as it is virtually impossible for the police to monitor all locations,” mentions Shadab. “The challenge is to manage the 5 vehicles deployed at different zones, but we have worked out a strategy with specific members of our team taking charge and partnering the police during their operations.”
Hon’ble Mayor, MC of Pune, Addl.MC & CEO PSCDCL brainstorming.
From the time the first COVID-19 positive case was reported, officials of the Pune Smart City Development Corporation and the Pune Police have been using the CCC as a war-room. “With hot spots identified across the city, monitoring and containment are governed entirely through hit-tech technology,” shares Atmaram Magar, Project Manager, “The Pune Smart City has developed customized web and mobile based dashboards which include applications like GIS tracking, heat-mapping analytics to keep track of patients, quarantine cases, contact tracing, community surveillance and likewise plan resources including quarantine facilities, isolation beds and associated manpower to respond to the current challenges.”
“We evolved a specific charter in line with the requirements of the Mumbai Police and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. The surveillance area was widened and currently, 417 cameras in 254 containment zones are being monitored.”
T.S. Senthil Kumar
Project Manager, Mumbai City Surveillance
SWC is partnering the municipality to extend technical and service support across various functions with an essential team of 30 members. “The executive dashboard made by our applications team has hugely helped the administrators in their tracking and zoning initiatives,” Atmaram elaborates. “Today, with more than 1350 members from the municipality going all out in their zoning activities making door-to-door assessments, our COC operators are mapping the data on an hourly basis through calls to provide timely updates, accurate analytics and proper direction to the administrators.”
With different information dissemination systems available like PASs and VMD boards, Arvind Shekhawat and team synchronizes timely relays across 161 locations. “The Mayor of Pune, Municipal Commissioner & Pune’s Addl. Municipal Commissioner directly appeal through both audio and visual mediums & audio jingles about COVID-19 which are broadcast ‘live’ every thirty minutes between 7 am and 10 pm daily.” The Pune Police utilize the PA systems for crowd control, incident management and awareness drives too. Other responsibilities for Arvind and team include ensuring smooth functioning of DC equipment, servers, and updating the executive dashboard. In addition, Emergency Call Boxes (ECB) provide emergency support to the citizens through its two-way (audio-visual) communication directly to the COC help desk team. ECBs act as additional surveillance on square junctions for crowd monitoring too.
For those earmarked under quarantine, there is help in the form of WI-FI services in Pune and Nagpur. “Here, it is more than just connectivity,” informs Farman Ali, Assistant Manager, Field & O&M. “For us, at L&T, it was all about providing high-speed internet service at these locations to give the patients a feel-good experience of being remotely in touch with their loved ones while recovering.”
At the nerve centre in Mumbai, Project Manager, T.S. Senthil Kumar, has a bigger responsibility. “With affected cases spiralling, we evolved a specific charter in line with the requirements of the Mumbai Police and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM),” shares Kumar. “The scope was akin to a project schedule, but the challenge was to implement the customizations without any lead time!” 218 cameras were identified close to 141 containment zones, and within 24 hours,
Divisional Commissioner of Prayagraj monitoring from the CCC
L&T made changes to ensure monitoring. Subsequently, the surveillance area was widened and currently, 417 cameras in 254 containment zones are being monitored. “We commissioned a Situational Monitoring Centre at MCGM DR control room which enables operators to completely visualise the events on a GIS map, create hotspots, monitor and modify workspaces, raise alerts, act on SOPs and much more,” he shares.
With the need for 24/7 service support, Senthil had to split his team depending on the priorities. Core team members, Mahesh and Kavery were based at the CCC working in continuous shifts while more hands were deployed for the maintenance and application works. For instance, through the video analytics in the containment areas, 938 incidents were captured by 500 cameras under three categories: loitering near the containment zone, trespassing into non-permitted areas and crowding. “When footfalls were more than 20% of the camera field of view, alarms were triggered, and SMS alerts were sent to the senior police officers, zone wise,” he highlights.
“We restored functionalities with operators working in 3 shifts, 24×7, to facilitate addressal of various requirements with an average of 2500 calls per day.”
Jignesh Dubey
Project Manager, Prayagraj Smart City
124 viewing centres were established for MCGM to enable live feed from the respective jurisdictions. For Senthil and team, this was one of their first tasks as the lockdown began. “We have completed the trenching and cable laying for 22 of the 24 wards and 20 wards have thus far been commissioned. The feeds are ‘live’ in the monitoring station with full functional requirements,” he mentions with satisfaction. At the commissioner’s office, all people entering are thermally screened (non-contact), the instrument has been integrated with Mumbai City’s surveillance project infrastructure and the ‘live’ feed is monitored at the main CCC.
The cutting-edge smart solutions deployed at Prayagraj Smart City are playing a key role to support the city administrators to ensure compliance to the lockdown through real time monitoring of strategic locations using 1000+ CCTV surveillance, provide necessary support to the citizens through a 24×7 operational city helpline (1920) and relay information on relevant developments through timely messages on 32 VMDs. Project Manager, Jignesh Dubey shares with vigour that the city helpline was modified with a revised set of SOPs. “We restored functionalities with operators working in 3 shifts, 24×7, to facilitate addressal of various requirements with an average of 2500 calls per day being addressed at the contact centre.”
Camera monitoring at Containment Zones in Mumbai
The Hyderabad Safe and Smart City project is equipping the city administration with smart solutions enabling actionable insights that is giving the edge for proactive decision making and enhanced vigil at the ground level. Omkar Nath, Project Manager, Solutions, along with M. Shanmuganathan, Project Director, have been at the forefront to ensure that the site team keeps the smart elements functioning 24/7.
The O&M team is always connected with the enforcement officials to broadcast customized announcements through 48 PASs in terms of language, locality etc., whenever crowds are detected. The team ensures the necessary uptime and availability of various cameras of the Hyderabad City Surveillance and Integrated Traffic Management Systems for the Police Department to identify crowd gathering and restrict movement of non-essential vehicles leveraging cutting-edge technologies like AI. The footage from nonconnected junctions are also being provided to departments on a need basis. L&T’s O&M BMS operators are working in two 12 hour shifts for regular O&M maintenance activities at the critical data centre and major issues, if any, are addressed immediately to L2/L3 level coordinates, who are also
connected round the clock.
“We converted the COC into a 24/7 COVID Contact Centre with 20 plus operators tracking details of people returning from abroad,” informs Bharath Reddy, Head O&M at Visakhapatnam, “reaching out to them once in 14 days to check on symptoms and pass on the information to the medical teams on a real time basis.” As many as 50 PASs installed on smart poles across the city relay official messages on the lockdown, crowd restrictions and precautionary messages, that are backed with 10 VMD boards conveying messages dynamically across strategic locations.
Variable Message Display
A bouquet of special applications to fight COVID-19
m-governance App: Developed for Vizag Smart City, it empowers health workers to carry out house surveys every
3 hours and record health parameters of self-isolated people. Around 40,000 people are using this app which is now equipped with a COVID-19 SOS button to notify medical emergencies. It also enables users to make surveys to check on health parameters based on which a scoring mechanism categorizes mild/moderate/ critical cases. A SOS is triggered for critical cases, while for non-critical cases, operators can connect with the concerned zonal doctors through telemedicine for further counselling. The app is programmed to alert the contact centre on any unwanted movement of people who are under self-isolation using geo-fencing technology.
No mask detection: A machine learning based no mask detection solution was deployed for Telangana police to detect citizens without masks. To achieve this for India specific conditions, the AI model was trained with over 4000+ images of citizens with and without masks. The solution now detects any type of masks including homemade ones.
“We have configured crowd analytics in 500 plus cameras, installed across Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Rachakonda commissionerates, to generate alerts if crowds exceed the configured threshold value that is based on the FOV, location, conditions, etc”
Omkar Nath
Project Manager, Solutions, Hyderabad Safe and Smart City
Physical distance monitoring: Within a short duration, SW&C, developed and deployed a deep learning based physical distance monitoring solution which detects citizens violating the mandated 6 ft. distance and raises alerts.
This is also visualised geospatially for authorities to pinpoint where the intensity of violations is high to take appropriate measures.
AI based crowd control: “We have configured crowd analytics in 500 plus cameras, installed across Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Rachakonda commissionerates,” informs Omkar Nath, “to generate alerts if crowds exceed the configured threshold value that is based on the FOV, location, conditions, etc. The department can identify crowded locations and immediately inform the field team for necessary action.” The Hyderabad police have so far received 60,000+ alerts and have been successful to disperse crowds through their field officers. “Apart from analytics configuration, we constantly update the department about daily alarms and publish various trends, for the department to act.” Omkar Nath adds proudly that
K. T. Rama Rao, Minister of IT of Telangana, commended the digital initiatives of the Hyderabad Safe and Smart City Project in the fight against COVID-19.
Physical distance monitoring solution deployed at Hyderabad
“The ANPR records number plates at all junctions, checks the locations of the vehicles and if the distance exceeds 3 km from one junction to another, violators are tracked and SMSs sent.”
M. Shanmuganathan
Project Director, Hyderabad Safe and Smart City
AI based vehicle movement restriction This AI-based system monitors vehicle movement through cameras installed across 110 junctions. People venturing more than 3 km from their local zones and at nights were tracked and fined during lockdown. “The ANPR records number plates at all junctions, checks the locations of the vehicles and if the distance exceeds 3 km from one junction to another, violators are tracked and SMSs sent,” informs
M. Shanmuganathan, Project Director, Hyderabad Safe and Smart City. “With another of our solutions, police can monitor and track all vehicle movement from 7:00 pm to 6:00 am, mark unwanted ones as violators, auto-generate fine challans and send SMSes to the offenders.”
Drone surveillance was deployed at sensitive areas in Mumbai like Worli, Koliwada and Dharavi by integrating them with the COC network through wireless connectivity. Police were able to communicate with the public thanks to In-built microphones and PA systems. It is commendable that the police have been notified of 10,700+ crowd alerts and crowd gathering has reduced by 34%. The number of vehicles entering and leaving the city are also tracked and the data is shared with MCGM for action against violating vehicles.
‘Sayyam’ App: tracks and monitors quarantined people in Pune. Movement of people is tracked in real time from the monitoring cell through geo fencing with colour tags – Red, Yellow and Green indicating their movement status and the App has been extremely handy for the municipality staff during their on-field surveys. Quarantine centres in Nagpur, Pune have been provided with Wi-Fi by the local administrations to stay connected while college students across Bihar are enjoying connectivity thanks to the efforts of SW&C.
Dash board of AI based vehicle movement restriction
Playing the role of a secure host
In Tamil Nadu, SW&C is entrusted with e-governance of 190 critical government applications which also includes the state’s website https://stopcorona.tn.gov.in. As a host, the onus is on ensuring security, timely updations for many of the government’s key sites such as the Tamil Nadu Medical Colleges & Hospitals, Aavin Milk, Tamil Nadu Police Department, Tamil Nadu Civil Supply Corporation, all vital stake holders in the fight against the pandemic.
On a larger smarter mission
“As we enter new normal conditions, technology is proving crucial in all our endeavours,” sums up R. Srinivasan. “For SW&C, at the threshold of innovations, are best paced to provide the edge in integrating futurist technologies to make cities safer and empower administrators with smarter, faster, and efficient solutions.”