As the cities in India continue to grow in size and population, the issues relating to the safety and security occupies a significant place. This segment includes the dimensions of physical safety of all as well as of the cyber-security.

Every smart city has a massive surveillance system, which provides an insight into the functioning of a city and tries to intervene on a real-time basis. Therefore, a highly effective and efficient data management system, robust IT infrastructure, ingenious monitoring solutions, use of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) led crowd management solutions is needed for ensuring safety, electronic data privacy, curbing crimes, law enforcement and well-being of the citizens.

Thus, smart cities are all about individual empowerment, sense of fulfilment, quality of life and raising the living standards. And all of it is incomplete without security and safety. If the resident of a smart city doesn’t feel safe, then the very purpose of creating smart cities would be defeated. In fact, safe city technology can be regarded as a foundation for smart city applications.

In short, safe city system should include the following features: healthcare; smart traffic systems and routes; smart safety systems for surveillance; smart systems of crisis management to support decision making, early warning, monitoring and forecasting emergencies and environmental situation; centrally operated units of police and Integrated Rescue System (IRS); safe internet connection and data protection; and centers of data processing.

NDMC has developed and implemented strengthen the safety and security cover for its citizens:

• It has improved the streetlight infrastructure by replacing the existing streetlights with LEDs for better illumination and energy saving, and their numbers were also increased from 16,500 to 17,500, especially to illuminate the ‘dark spots’.
• NDMC has partnered with the Japanese multinational corporation Nippon Electric Company (NEC) for an intelligent video surveillance system using facial recognition technology. It would perform real-time matching of people entering the park against the NDMC’s watch list of preregistered individuals, which enables the NDMC to automatically identify and detect a person of interest from CCTV footage and to rapidly take appropriate action to reduce the risk of public safety threats.
• The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) will install 625 ‘smart poles’ equipped with ‘panic buttons’ near gates of 43 school buildings, 16 Metro stations and prominent markets and other sensitive spots by December 2019 as a means of additional security. The ‘panic button’ will help people contact officials at the civic agency’s command centre in cases of emergency. The CCTV cameras on these poles will be equipped to revolve 360 degrees and will be able to capture footage of up to the range of 100 metres. The information collected from these smart poles would be sent to the NDMC command centre at Palika Kendra.

55 smart poles have been installed in Connaught Place by the NDMC in collaboration with Indus Towers. Each pole is equipped with Wi-Fi access points, Smart lighting solution (warm LED lights consuming lesser energy), and CCTV cameras (for video surveillance). Further, 18 environment sensors to measure Air Quality Index (AQI) are installed for real-time monitoring and the information will be displayed on 9 Variable messages Display installed in the NDMC area.