The Third Eye project, initiated by Gurgaon Traffic Police, utilises innovative mobile phone application to capture images and track traffic rule violaters in the city.
Road accidents account for an alarmingly high number of deaths in India every year. Even though most of them are due to traffic rule violations, there is a dearth of adequate administrative attention on traffic management issues. Traditional methods of manually managing traffic have severe limitations in terms of time and location. Keeping this in view, the Gurgaon Traffic Police, in collaboration with Denave India Private Limited, Nokia India and Millennium City Welfare Association, launched the Third Eye project in August 2011 to provide requisite portability to tools used for monitoring traffic rules compliance.
Third Eye uses Nokia E5 mobile phones to capture clear images of traffic offenders. The phones are enabled with software Tselina, developed by Denave, that assists the uploading of these photographs on a central server housed in the Gurgaon Traffic Police headquarters. The images are geo-tagged and used as evidence to issue challans to defaulters. A traffic constable is sent to the doorstep of the defaulter to recover penalty. Extensive training was provided to the constables in daily operation of the handsets, ways to capture clear images, and regular troubleshooting issues.
The project is designed to cover the East, West and National Highway zones of Gurgaon and act as a complement to the outdoor surveillance system. The latter uses fixed Closed Circuit Tele Vision cameras at main junctions in the city to monitor traffic. Third Eye project has provided a cheap, portable, simplified, and familiar solution to the problem of fixity of monitoring tools. As of November 2011, approximately 200 traffic constables have been enabled with these handsets and nearly 3000 challans have been issued. This is the first instance of using mobile phone technology for traffic management in north India.
This case study was published in December 2011.
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