CHENNAI: Date: 31.10.2011. Time: 02:07:06. Place: Central Railway Station. Hundreds of passengers are fast asleep in the portico. Suddenly, chaos erupts as men in khaki and a few onlookers chase someone. Commuters seated on chairs and occupying the floors witness the drama, cluelessly. A couple of minutes later, the chasers return with a youth wearing a green T-shirt. The crowd watches in shock as the Railway Protection Force (RPF) begin removing stolen wallets and mobile phones, hidden in his undergarments.The suspect, a 20-something youth, had stolen money and mobile phones from three persons sleeping in the station within a span of 60 minutes. He was possibly emboldened by the assumption that no one was watching. Unfortunately for him, that was not the case. The young thief was unaware that he was under the surveillance of a third eye — the RPF’s Closed Circuit TV Cameras, which landed him in the slammer. CCTV cameras installed at the Central Railway Station as a tool for beefing up security have come in handy for the RPF and Government Railway Police (GRP) who use it to crack down on criminals. According to S R Gandhi, Senior Divisional Security Commissioner, Chennai Division, Southern Railway, the cameras were helping them monitor the activities of miscreants and had made the process of apprehending troublemakers easy.Take another interesting case, which happened earlier this year, where the cameras came to the rescue of the cops. Following complaints of missing baggage at one of the country’s biggest railway stations, the cops zeroed in on a woman, who was alighting with the complainant’s bag from a train. The footage recorded in a CCTV camera had come in handy for the cops. Afterwards, an RPF personnel stumbled upon a group of women involved in a series of bag lifting cases on trains bound for Chennai. “With this vital clue, we were able to arrest a suspect. On interrogation, the bag lifter revealed that she was part of a five-member gang belonging to the same family which was operating on different trains,” a senior official said. The ring was effectively busted.Gandhi said that the CCTV cameras were helpful in a big way in rescuing children in the station. “We are planning to instal more cameras in the coming years,” he added. The Central Railway Station premises comprises the adjacent Moore Market Complex (MMC) and is equipped with 50 CCTV cameras, connected to the master control room, manned by RPF and GRP officers.
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