Telangana Police’s command and control centre building, at Banjara Hills in Hyderabad, will be ready in six months, and will be able to process footage from 100,000 CCTV cameras in under a minute, the state government said in a tweet on February 14. The tweet, originally, in the Telugu language, claimed that “if you go out for work, 50 cameras will be able to spot you by the time you are back,” and that “every inch of the state will be under police radar”. “If a crime happens anywhere, there will be information immediately,” it added. Independent researcher Srinivas Kodali helped MediaNama with the translation of the tweet. https://twitter.com/IPR_DD_Ramana/status/1228302950059012096 The command centre will reportedly have four towers, a data centre and command control centre with a total built-up area of 6.2 lakh square feet at an estimated cost of Rs 350 crore, however, its operationalisation has been delayed, as construction of the facility was initially expected to be complete by December 2019. "Telangana has banned protests in the very first year it was formed because of protests part of [the] Telangana movement. CCTVs everywhere are to ensure [that] no one dares to come out on the street and give away complete control of public spaces to cops. They want to control every corner of the state, this is a draconian form of governance," Kodali told MediaNama. Calling it an "utter disregard for the rule of law," he added that Telangana's surveillance tactics can serve as a blueprint for other state governments,…
