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Chaos, Cameras & Cold Tea: Why Urban Surveillance Needs a Rethink!  - by Sakshi Bhalla
Chaos, Cameras & Cold Tea: Why Urban Surveillance Needs a Rethink! - by Sakshi Bhalla

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There’s a certain kind of silence that sits inside a surveillance control room.

It’s the kind that hums beneath the sound of endless footage, the flicker of 60 monitors playing street corners on loop, and the low hiss of a coffee mug being refilled—for the third time—because Officer Ray, one of the city’s most committed civic officers, is still trying to catch what the cameras missed.

A pothole that caused an accident.
An illegal vendor stretch that escalated into a traffic snarl.
A stray cow that wandered too close to a school gate.
A street fight that nobody knew happened—until it went viral online.

You’d think with all these screens, someone would have seen it.
But Chief Officer Burnt, the no-nonsense head of the command center, isn’t convinced.

“₹50 lakhs spent on surveillance, Ray. And we find out about potholes from Twitter?”

 

Budget Blues and Surveillance Cues

Where the Story Begins

This is not fiction. It’s how many of our urban authorities operate today.

At Valiance, we’ve worked with with frontline officers, municipal staff, and public safety teams. And no matter which city we go to, we hear a version of this same story:

“We have the footage. We just don’t have the time.”
“There’s too much data, not enough people.”
“We know when something happens—just not when it’s happening.”

Ray and Burnt are not characters in a comic. They’re reflections of a system that’s doing its best—just not fast enough.

Surveillance in Indian cities has grown. But intelligence? Not quite.

 

The Problem Isn’t Infrastructure. It’s Invisibility

India’s Smart Cities Mission invested ₹1.64 lakh crore across 100 cities. Thousands of CCTV cameras were installed. Command centers were set up. But the gap wasn’t in how many cameras went up—it was in what those cameras could do.

Let’s look at the numbers:

  • Less than 1% of video footage is ever reviewed in time (Source: IDC & Seagate)
  • In Ahmedabad, 6,500+ cameras were installed—but ~5% were found disconnected at any time (TOI, 2023)
  • Nagpur deployed an intelligent traffic management system—but less than 10% of violations captured led to any action (City enforcement reports)
  • Gurugram’s ₹160 crore camera expansion was stalled over maintenance issues and lack of actionable outcomes
     

And that’s just a handful of examples. Across the board, we’re seeing a trend:

We’re collecting more video than ever before. But we're acting on less of it than we need to.

 

What We’re Missing (And What It’s Costing Us)

As someone deeply embedded in building AI for urban challenges, we can tell you—this isn’t a tech issue. It’s a priority issue.

We’ve mistaken surveillance for security.
We’ve mistaken infrastructure for insight.
We’ve mistaken watching for knowing.

While Officer Ray sits watching hours of footage, the real emergencies unfold elsewhere—in the blind spots of these systems:

  • A fire begins in a vendor cart before dawn
     
  • An elderly pedestrian slips near a pothole and isn’t noticed until traffic piles up
     
  • A group of teenagers is involved in an altercation, and no one knows until someone posts it online
     

We can’t respond fast enough, because we aren’t detecting fast enough.

And we can’t detect fast enough, because we’re still relying on humans to do what machines can do better: spot patterns, flag anomalies, and trigger alerts.

 

The Surveillance Tipping Point: Why Now?

The shift from passive monitoring to proactive intelligence is not optional anymore. It’s essential. And the good news? India is ready.

Here’s why:

  • Urban populations are exploding: 600M+ Indians will live in cities by 2030, contributing 75% to national GDP.
     
  • AI adoption is rising: With the IndiaAI mission investing ₹1,000 crore in Centres of Excellence, civic and public safety applications are already being explored.
     
  • Policy is in our favor: The shift toward indigenous surveillance tech—secure, cloud-hosted, and privacy-aware—is opening space for platforms built for Indian urban realities.
     
  • The market is maturing: India’s video surveillance market is growing at 20.8% CAGR till 2029. But the next frontier isn’t more cameras—it’s smarter cameras.
     

Introducing CivicEye — But Only a Glimpse

Now, this isn’t the article where I walk you through CivicEye’s tech specs or show you fancy dashboards.

This is a story. And stories deserve timing.

What I will say is this: CivicEye was built for Ray. And for Burnt.

It was built for that moment when the camera catches something crucial—and the system doesn’t just record it, but understands it.

It was built for the officer who’s tired of scanning footage for signs of trouble—and would rather be out solving problems.

It was built to bring timely intelligence into command rooms—not just footage archives.

CivicEye integrates with your existing infrastructure, flags incidents in real time, and helps city teams move from reaction to prevention.

But more on that in Part 2 of this series.

 

Ending Where It All Comes Together

Let’s circle back.

Officer Ray’s tea, once cold and forgotten during hours of reviewing footage, is now hot.

Because now, he doesn’t have to find the problem. The system brings it to him.

 

 

 

 

What’s Next

This is just the beginning.

In the next piece, I’ll take you deeper into CivicEye—how it works, how it's different, and what real-world results are emerging from its deployment in Indian cities.

But for now, here’s the truth we all need to sit with:

We don’t need more eyes. We need sharper vision.

And maybe, just maybe, it starts with the dashboard.

Author:
Sakshi Bhalla: Associate Director - Marketing

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sakshibhalla/
 

Footnotes for Citation

  1. Press Information Bureau (PIB). “100 Smart Cities Get Integrated Command and Control Centres.”
    https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1913456
     
  2. The Economic Times. “Smart Cities Mission: Over 90% Projects Worth ₹1.5 Lakh Cr Completed So Far, Says SBI Report.”
    https://m.economictimes.com/news/india/smart-cities-mission-over-90-projects-worth-rs-1-5-lakh-cr-completed-so-far-says-sbi-report/articleshow/120515080.cms
     
  3. Policy Circle. “Lessons from India’s Smart Cities Mission.”
    https://www.policycircle.org/policy/lessons-from-smart-cities-mission/
     
  4. PR Newswire / Research and Markets. “India Video Surveillance Market Report 2023–2029.”
    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/india-video-surveillance-market-report-2023-2029-west-india-dominates-northern-india-sees-rising-demand-smart-city-initiatives-fuel-video-surveillance-growth-302000446.html
     
  5. BlueWeave Consulting. “India CCTV Camera Market Size Set to Expand.”
    https://www.blueweaveconsulting.com/report/india-cctv-camera-market
     
  6. IDC & Seagate. “The Digitization of the World: From Edge to Core.”
    https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-seagate-dataage-whitepaper.pdf
     
  7. Times of India. “Camera-Shy Pvt Cos Fail on Surveillance Device Upkeep in Ahmedabad.”
    https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/camera-shy-pvt-cos-fail-on-surveillance-device-upkeep-in-ahmedabad/articleshow/121447228.cms
     
  8. Times of India. “Nagpur’s Traffic System Misses Enforcement Goals.”
    https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/nagpur-implements-intelligent-trafficsystem-amid-rs248cr-of-unpaid-fines/articleshow/121684031.cms
     
  9. MeitY / IndiaAI Initiative Overview. “IndiaAI Mission: Empowering AI Innovation.”
    https://indiaai.gov.in/news/cabinet-approves-indiaai-mission-with-over-rs-10000-crore-outlay
     
  10. India Today Insight. “India’s Smart Cities Safer, Breathe Cleaner Air.”
    https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/indias-smart-cities-safer-breathe-cleaner-air-but-2723618-2025-05-12

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We are Valiance Solutions, a deeptech company solving one of the world’s biggest blind spots—making surveillance systems intelligent. Our proprietary Video Intelligence Platform converts real-time video feeds into predictive insights using AI, edge computing, and GenAI. From forests to factories, we automate detection, issue life-saving alerts, and enable natural language video search—delivering not just visibility, but foresight.

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