Bharti Airtel deploys smartphone-based system for Bangalore traffic police

Bharti Airtel has announced the successful deployment of the Traffic Police Force Automation system in Bangalore by providing BlackBerry smartphones to all the traffic police officers in the city.
The deployment process was carried out in phases and the last lot of BlackBerry smartphones was given out by Dr VS Acharya, home minister of Karnataka. In the first phase of the project, initiated in 2008, 280 smartphones were distributed; while in the second, 370 smartphones were given out. In all, 650 Bangalore traffic police officers are equipped with the smartphones.
Speaking to Telecom Yatra about the response towards the first phase of the initiative, Najib Khan, chief operating officer, -South, enterprise services, Bharti Airtel, said, “Initial response was that of resistance from the inspectors and sub- inspectors who were given these smartphones because they were so used to the paper challan system. The challenge was to train these people and acquaint them with the technology and its uses. Once they got comfortable with the thing, the response has been encouraging.” He added, “This system also ensures transparency as the solution allows officials to monitor their staff and generate periodical reports on performance.”
This is the largest deployment of BlackBerry smartphones for a police department in India. The officers are not only equipped with a BlackBerry device but also a Bluetooth supported printer. Carbon paper and challan books could soon become history.
The service offers many added benefits like a data base of traffic offenders, real time access to history of offenses committed by drivers etc. The database, informed Khan, has been built by realigning and digitising the paper challans. These have been fed into a common, secure data centre, which is accessible online.
To access the past information of a particular offender, his license number and the registration number of the vehicle need to be punched in. Information gets updated in real time and the system is capable of searching through over 2 million cases in less than 2 minutes. This secure login based application assists in determining if the offender has a pending fine against his vehicle. Additionally, there is a video surveillance system for traffic monitoring. The traffic violation video captures are sent to the database server which helps in identifying traffic violators.
Although BlackBerry smartphones are being used, the application can work on a non-BlackBerry platform as well. All it requires is a handset that supports GPRS.
The software has been developed by TELiBrahma, a Banglore-based mobile solutions company. Suresh Narasimha, chief executive officer, TELiBrahma told Telecom Yatra that the software was based on their platform called MobiLogix and was totally secure. He added,” The application can be built for other handsets as well but BlackBerry is very secure. Plus, you can control the calls and applications that are to run on the handset handed out to the officers.”