356 shopkeepers and colonies have plugged their own cameras into Kashi's city network — and it is finding lost luggage

Varanasi's Smart City programme has cameras at roughly 720 locations across the city — about 2,300 of them — and the network has quietly been growing in a different way. Residents and businesses are now linking their own cameras to it, and 356 private ones have been connected so far. They belong to petrol pumps, jewellery shops and residential colonies, the kind of cameras that already point at a gate or a lane and simply had no reason to talk to anyone. The footage feeds into the Trinetra Smart City control room, which runs round the clock in shifts. More than ten police personnel work there, with a separate traffic police team, and about two dozen more staff keep the junction cameras and the technology behind them running — over a hundred people in all across the shifts. Smart City PRO Shakambhari has said the monitoring itself is done by the police, while Smart City provides the technical support. For a visitor, the most useful part is the least dramatic one. Alongside managing traffic and issuing challans for violations, the control room regularly pulls up footage to trace luggage that travellers have left behind or lost somewhere in the city. In a place where a few lakh people move through the ghats and the temple lanes on a busy Sawan day, that is a quietly reassuring thing to know exists.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala — Varanasi