KP budget: Rs500m allocated for Peshawar Safe City Project

PESHAWAR: An amount of Rs500 million has been allocated in yet another annual budget for a project that has been on the backburner for 13 years.

The Safe City Project in Peshawar has become a white elephant that costs millions of rupees to the exchequer every year since 2009,10. An office staffed with senior officers was set up for the project.

However, no practical work could be done to secure Peshawar through technology due to a lack of interest and wrangling between the government departments. In the budget for 2022-23, the government has allocated another Rs500 million for the project.

Under the project, initially over 6,000 closed-circuit television cameras (CCTVs) were supposed to be installed at over 850 points across the provincial capital. These would be monitored by the senior offices live as well as from a central command system for keeping a check on law and order and to improve the treatment of the cops towards the public.

Innumerable meetings have been held and millions have been spent on the theoretical work every month for the last 13 years. However, no practical work was done on a project that was much needed in the years when the city was worst hit by terrorism.

“CCTV cameras and technology help prevent crimes and keep an eye on suspicious elements besides monitoring the behaviour of the cops,” an official said. He added that CCTVs played the main role in maintaining law and order and working out cases in the modern world.

A source recently said the authorities had planned to launch phase-1 of the Safe City Project from Hayatabad for which work had been done. The Safe City Project for the capital city of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is an example of how the government and its departments deal with some of the important projects for the security and welfare of the public.

The project could not be executed due to the poor handling by successive governments and wrangling between government departments. Though the officials of these departments are receiving salaries amounting to millions of rupees, they are more interested in gaining power and control over projects rather than providing security and relief to people.

The Safe City projects were proposed for Peshawar, Lahore and Islamabad at the same time. The projects were executed in Islamabad and Lahore many years back. After the completion of the project in Islamabad and Lahore, authorities in Punjab had announced the same projects for many other cities in the province recently.

A special Safe Cities Authority was also been set up in Punjab in 2015. Even the incumbent and former chief ministers of the province have held several meetings regarding the project but none of them could ensure timely completion or at least proper launching of the much-needed project. Recently the Peshawar police have introduced a small-scale plan to install cameras at some of checkpoints for improved monitoring.

The new camera system is solar-powered and can be monitored remotely from the offices of senior cops via the internet. However, the city needs hundreds of cameras at important points that can work round the clock for better monitoring.