KARACHI: After spending more than a billion rupees on video surveillance of the city, the Sindh police are finding it hard to operate some 800 cameras round the clock amid frequent outages with the result that sometimes footage of high-profile attacks remains unavailable to them, it emerged on Monday.

Sources said the police had asked K-Electric (KE) to exempt the surveillance system from loadshedding which the power utility claimed was not possible due to technical reasons as well as the long default history of the law-enforcement agency.

The sources and officials at the two organisations suggested that recent arrangements to operate the ‘video surveillance system’ were needed to be upgraded for the desired results.

The question emerged in the wake of a statement by Sindh IG Iqbal Mahmood that the video surveillance system could not record footage of the attack on journalist Hamid Mir on Sharea Faisal on April 19 as the cameras were not working at the time of the incident.

“The attack on Hamid Mir was carried out at the airport- Sharea Faisal intersection,” said an official. “Actually there was no camera on that particular site but definitely there are cameras on the route which was later mentioned by the media where attackers were seen moving. However, their footage could not be captured due to loadshedding that frequently affects the system across the city.”

The official said the Sindh police were finding it hard to manage the round-the-clock operation of the surveillance system as loadshedding complaints had increased with the rise in temperature and the voltage fluctuation affected its backup power supply system also.

“The Sindh police have installed UPS [uninterrupted power supply] with each set of cameras across the city but they never get charged properly due to voltage fluctuation and at several places the problem has destroyed the system’s cabling and other equipment,” said the official.

“That’s the reason the Sindh police have even approached the K-Electric requesting loadshedding exemption for those cameras-mounted poles. They have also been requested to at least maintain smooth voltage supply to those areas so the backup system of the Sindh police may work properly.”

Only last month the Sindh police launched another massive Rs846 million project to put Karachi under a closer video surveillance in addition to the already installed cameras in line with their resources and capacity building programme amid growing security challenges and the ongoing targeted operation in the city. However, the issue regarding power supply remains a key anomaly to be resolved for smooth operation of the system.

“There are some 800 cameras that have been placed all over the city, spread over 6,500 square kilometres, which is a vast area,” said the spokesman for the KE.

“These cameras are connected to the feeders, and if these feeders have loadshedding, the cameras are also affected by it.

“There is no other way as in order to exempt these cameras, which consume up to 400 watts of electricity, we cannot exempt the entire feeder, which is sending out almost 2MW to the area.”

Secondly and most importantly, he said, the Sindh police owed more than Rs920 million to the KE and despite being such a ‘big defaulter’, the power utility had not severed any of its connections. It was the responsibility of the police authorities to have a back-up plan if an area and subsequently the camera got shut due to loadshedding, he added.

“Most cameras are placed in the high-loss or very-high-loss areas, and these areas have a high level of theft. Therefore, just to exempt these cameras we cannot exempt the entire feeder where there is a galore of kundas and losses.

“If the Sindh government or police were serious enough, they could have installed mini-solar panels, which could generate enough electricity for these cameras,” said a KE spokesman.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2014