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Along with sniffer dogs and anti-terror squads, this edition of Mumbai Marathon had a unique eye in the sky watching over the participants and ensuring a smooth, incident-free run.
This was possible thanks to a tie-up between Mumbai Police and drone company Airpix for use of a drone for aerial surveillance of the Mumbai Marathon.
A ground station was set up with the target of monitoring the two main crowded points of entry and exit at the marathon to ensure no untoward incidents took place due to overcrowding.
Instead of flying continuously, the drone took to the skies about three times every one hour for 10 to 15 minutes each to capture the live video of the crowd below. It then simultaneously relayed the coverage in real time to their team at the ground station that was remote controlling the drone.
“With the help of a police constable seated with our team in the drone control room, we were able to constantly monitor and zero in on areas where bottlenecks had built up as the large gathering could not be monitored by ground security staff,” said Shinil Shekhar of Airpix. “These drones can cover a 1-km radius and go up to a height of 100 to 150 metres accessing areas and corners where the police cannot reach owing to wide coverage area and limited manpower,” he added.
Run by a group of four young entrepreneurs, Mumbai-based Airpix had also provided drone service to the city police during the Ambedkar Jayanti rally last month. However, this time they presented an improvised aircraft mounted with both high definition and 10x zoom camera enabling better clarity and option of zooming in on an individual suspect in a crowd, according to Aniket Tatipamula, who is incharge of technology for Airpix.
Krishna Prakash, Additional Commissioner of Police, said: “Besides live aerial surveillance, the recorded clips of the marathon proceedings have been handed to us for post event analysis to improve our security arrangements next time by planning better deployment of security forces and strategy.”
Impressed by the success of the trial at the marathon, Mumbai Police is considering using drone for the upcoming Republic Day celebrations at Marine Drive.
“Drones are helpful whenever there is a planned event such as Ganpati Visarjan or marathon to not just keep an eye on proceedings but also use for analysis and strategic purposes after the event,” added Prakash.
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