Mechanism sought to deal with plaints about capture of traffic violations by AI cameras

Government informs Kerala High Court of request to Keltron to develop special grievance redressal mechanism for AI camera challans.

The State government on Thursday informed the Kerala High Court that it had requested Keltron to develop a special grievance redressal mechanism to take care of complaints regarding challans issued for violation of traffic rules detected by AI cameras.

The submission was made by the government after a public interest litigation by Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan and Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala seeking a court-monitored inquiry into allegations of corruption in the implementation of the AI camera project.

In an affidavit filed in response to the petition, the government submitted that the Finance department had never remarked that the project should be rejected as contended by the petitioner. The department did not object to the awarding of the project to Keltron at any point of time. The government dismissed as baseless allegations of illegality, corruption, and nepotism in the implementation of the project.

The government submitted that images of traffic rule violating vehicles would automatically be captured by the cameras. The programming was done in such a manner that only images of violating vehicles would only be captured and nothing else. The captured image would be sent as encrypted data to servers in the State Central Control Room under the Motor Vehicles department (MVD).

Therefore, personal data of individuals is well protected in the system. The servers are in the custody of the MVD, and entry to the server room was controlled by biometric access control. Data is encrypted and access to the servers is limited to authorised departmental officers through firewalls. The government is also planning to issue instructions to the Transport Commissioner to get the system audited by a security certification agency. With the implementation of the e-camera systems, the number of fatalities on account of road accidents had come down compared to the rate of 2022.