Dinesh Kamath's news item 'Every housing society should invest on CCTVs' that was published in Newsband

Every housing society should invest on CCTVs

By Dinesh Kamath

NAVI MUMBAI: One of the top ex-employees of Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) has come up with a brilliant suggestion that can be adopted by residents of the city to reduce crimes considerably and make up for the understaffed police department.

According to him it should be made mandatory for every Cooperative Housing Society to install CCTVs inside their societies and on the roads. According to him, since it would become economically burdensome for the government to install CCTVs everywhere, every housing society can be told to bear the cost of the CCTVs and get them installed at sensitive spots inside the society. This practice, according to him, will certainly help in bringing down the crime ratio in the city as these CCTVs will assist the police in cracking criminal cases. If every society takes the responsibility of making their areas secure from criminals, it will be very beneficial both for the residents as well as the police department, he said.

According to him, the cases relating to chain-snatching, robbery or murder are not cracked but this policy of making every society install CCTVs will put an end to the problems. He said that even the criminals will have to think thousand times before committing a crime once this policy is implemented.  Thus CCTVs can not only tackle crimes but also prevent them. He also went on to suggest that the occupation certificate should be issued to new buildings only after they install CCTVs, not before that.

In fact, CCTVs are not very expensive. For medium-range cameras, the cost would approximately be Rs 16,000. They come with a cable, camera and video recording devices and necessary training for monitoring the videos.

Even the police authorities found this suggestion very valuable and they felt that it should be seriously considered.