Over 800 Odisha Police CCTV Cameras Offline; ₹76 Cr Budget Surrendered

21 Sep 2026, 10:27 by Vinay Kakkad · KalingaTV

Over 800 CCTV cameras installed in Odisha police stations under Supreme Court orders are offline, while ₹76 crore allocated for the surveillance project has been returned unspent by the state government.

As reported by Hindustan Times, In an urgent dispatch to Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Hemant Sharma, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Sanjay Kumar pushed the state to intervene and compel the state-run Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC) to carry out immediate repairs. Kumar also requested the re-release of the surrendered ₹76 crore in the upcoming supplementary budget so police can clear dues owed to OCAC and settle ongoing maintenance costs.

The hardware failure is widespread across frontline policing units. A September 17 audit conducted by system integrators Krystal Integrated Services Pvt Ltd / KELTRON revealed that 823 units—with separate headquarters figures citing up to 828—are offline. The breakdowns comprise 795 cameras inside main police stations and 33 units across remote outposts, carved out of a broader network of 16,672 cameras installed across 645 stations and 263 outposts statewide.

The maintenance lapse persists despite direct administrative interventions. Operational problems were formally flagged during a high-level government meeting on March 12, prompting repeated requests to OCAC to keep all feeds active.

The widespread outages cut against binding judicial mandates. In 2020, the Supreme Court of India ordered round-the-clock, tamper-proof CCTV coverage across all police establishments to curb custodial violence and safeguard detainees’ constitutional rights.

In Odisha, police camera blackouts have previously triggered judicial fury. Following the alleged September 2024 sexual assault of an Indian Army officer’s fiancée inside Bhubaneswar’s Bharatpur police station, the Orissa High Court took suo motu cognisance of the facility’s missing cameras. Then Chief Justice Chakradhari Sharan Singh censured the state, noting that functional feeds would have established the facts immediately.

Two years after that judicial rebuke, hundreds of dark lenses and surrendered funds point to persistent administrative inertia in keeping the state’s policing transparent.