Maha CM,Uddhav inaugurate BMC's upgraded disaster control room

To make its operations more effective, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has upgraded its state-of-the-art disaster control room by installing a video wall and connecting it through 5,000 CCTV camera network across the megapolis.
The upgraded disaster control room was today inaugurated by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis along with Shivsena chief Uddhav Thackeray at the civic body's headquarter here.
Constructed at a cost of Rs 7 crore, the control room is being monitored by specially trained 89 staff of the civic body, who will monitor the live feeds of over 5,000 high definition CCTV cameras functional across the city and would follow the Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) in case of emergency.

"We could not follow SOP during 26/11 (terror) attack as the SOP were not devised then. But now we have this system in place and SOP would be activated in case of emergency," Fadnavis said.
The control room was shifted from a 6,000 square feet area on the ground floor to a plush 8,000 square feet area on the second floor of the building which is BMC's headquarter.
"Being an international city, Mumbai needed a comprehensive plan to tackle any eventuality or emergency. So BMC devised this facility in such a way that it could deal emergency very effectively by improving its response time and ability to mitigate the damage done," said the Chief Minister.

Uddhav Thackeray outlined the various developmental and welfare issues taken by the civic body.

"It's hard to believe that BMC can do such an excellent job and adopt high-tech tools to keep its people safe, besides it has taken multi-pronged steps to improve people's life especially in the field of heath and education."
Civic chief Ajoy Mehta, while describing the features of the refurbished room said, "Since the surveillance system through cameras is placed in GPS mode, therefore, disaster room's utility increases multiple times to get real-time updates beside giving guidance to the fire engines if they are on the way on busy city roads to douse blaze."

Mehta also informed Fadnavis that BMC was also in process to streamline the ever increasing and humongous court cases being faced by the civic body.
He said, "BMC is facing or fighting almost 70,000 cases in 11 different courts averaging 1500 cases on a daily basis and we have found that we do not have sufficient control over these cases. This is why a Litigation Management System was underway to cope up this menace of court cases.