Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has mulled involving a premier technical institution such as an IIT to develop a real-time mechanism for monitoring CCTV footage of police stations without human intervention. A Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta was hearing a suo motu case registered over the lack of functional CCTV cameras in police stations across the country.
Senior advocate Siddharth Dave, assisting the top court, submitted that while some states had complied with judicial orders on CCTV installation, several others had not. “The Union has not complied – neither NIA, nor ED, nor CBI,” he added.
At this, Justice Mehta emphasised that the issue was not merely one of compliance but of real-time oversight.
“The issue is oversight. Today, there may be a compliance affidavit; tomorrow, officers may switch off cameras. We were thinking of a control room without human intervention. If any camera goes off, it should raise a flag,” he remarked. “We can even think of involving IIT to provide a mechanism so that CCTV footage is monitored without human intervention,” he added. The Supreme Court took cognisance of a media report which revealed that 11 people had died in police custody in Rajasthan in the first eight months of 2025.
