Gujarat Police use 172 CCTV cameras to track down kidnapped child, highlighting need for tech solution

Soon after dawn on September 8, a Gujarat Police vehicle ground to a halt directly in front of a Hero Splendor motorcycle in the pilgrimage town of Virpur in Rajkot district, cutting off the path of the vehicle. Riding the motorcycle was Lalit Roopsingh Jamre, a 25-year-old farm labourer from Barwani in Madhya Pradesh. On the petrol tank sat a boy of five, wearing a bright orange T-shirt. Jamre had allegedly kidnapped the child 48 hours earlier from Mota Ankadiya village in Amreli district, more than 100 km away. When they began the investigation, police had the name of a suspect, and the make and number of his bike allegedly used in the kidnapping. They also knew the colour of the T-shirt the child was wearing. What they needed were pictures from traffic and security cameras that would give them an idea of which way the bike had gone. When they ultimately swooped on Jamre, police had gone through footage from 172 CCTV cameras and several police and private cameras to piece together his route across two districts. They had stumbled at forks, crossings, and blind spots, gone back and forth on village roads, and struggled to access footage from private cameras. The hunt for the alleged kidnapper put in focus the relevance of a hackathon that the Gujarat government announced last month – inviting more than 1,000 entities to find a tech solution to integrate the operations of more than 1.8 lakh CCTV cameras into a single system across the state. The intention is precisely to address the problems that police faced in their chase through Rajkot and Amreli, and to more efficiently track vehicles moving across the length and breadth of the state. Outside the boundaries of major cities and towns, the network of public-facing CCTV cameras under the VISWAS (Video Integration and State Wide Advanced Security) project and surveilled through the ‘Trinetra’ command and control centre at the state level and the 34 ‘Netram’ sites in the districts, remains non-existent or spotty. Technical outages, poor placement and quality of footage, and limited storage in the public and private cameras are significant drawbacks, especially in rural, mountainous and peripheral areas. On September 7 evening, a sharecropper couple, migrants from Alirajpur in MP, told the Amreli Taluka police that their five-year-old son had been kidnapped by a man who had been a guest at their home in Mota Ankadiya village 15 km to the west of the district headquarters. The couple said this man, Lalit Roopsingh Jamre, had first met them six months ago, and appeared unexpectedly at their door at the end of August, begging for shelter till he found a job. They had taken him in, the couple told police. On September 6, the couple allegedly saw Jamre riding away on their Hero Splendor motorcycle. Their son was with him, they told police. They did not think much of the incident at the time. But then, 24 hours passed, and Jamre and their son did not return. Footage from the district-level ‘Netram’ CCTV command and control centre in Amreli showed the motorcycle had headed west from Mota Ankadiya towards Kunkavav. There is a fork in the road there – one branch goes northwest towards Rural Rajkot; the other goes south, towards Bagasara. There are also a dozen rural roads that go to various villages. The motorcycle could have taken any of these roads. So the investigators emailed the Rajkot Rural police and Gandhinagar Trinetra, the state-level CCTV network command and control centre. “But we knew we would find him only if he had entered or passed by a major town. If he went through the villages, it would be much harder to get a visual,” Inspector Omdevsinh Jadeja, SHO of Amreli Taluka police station, said. The Trinetra Control provided a lead. “He seemed to be heading towards Jetpur [in Rajkot district],” Omdevsinh said. The investigators contacted the Rajkot Rural police, and sure enough, Rajkot Rural Netram was able to get a visual of the bike in Jetpur town at 8.30 am on September 7. “We picked up the trail 52 km to the west in Rajkot district without having to check cameras on every road out of Amreli district,” Omdevsinh said. But the bike still had to be located. At the Rajkot Rural command and control centre, a team led by PSI Abhaysinh Jadeja put in the registration number of the motorcycle – GJ-16-CE-1817 – into the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system. Around 15% of cameras under the Rajkot Rural police are ANPR, officers said. They are installed on major roads, and specifically capture number plates of vehicles. The data are stored for three months. Besides these ANPR cameras, fixed cameras and Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras – which have a distinctive round shape – are also part of the VISWAS project. Going through the ANPR data, Abhaysinh’s team found that the number plate they were tracking had been captured by seven different cameras. But was the kidnapped child still on the motorcycle? Abhaysinh’s team checked footage from other cameras that showed more than just the number plate. They found five cameras that had captured images of Jamre and the child – the last of these sightings was at Dhareshwar chowkdi to the north of Jetpur town. The details were supplied to the investigators from Amreli. Several teams of the Amreli Police reached Jetpur and started looking for the bike. They checked footage from 15-17 private road-facing cameras, besides the police cameras at Dhareshwar chowkdi. One of these cameras had captured Jamre riding past a mosque. This was around 8.45 pm on September 7. This road, to the north of Jetpur town, leads to a crossing from where one road goes north towards the villages of Rabarika, Jambusi, and Mevasa; another merges with National Highway 27, which goes towards Dhoraji, Upleta, and ultimately, Porbandar on the coast to the west, and Rajkot to the North. At this key intersection, several Netram CCTV cameras were allegedly out of order, possibly because of problems with Internet connectivity, power, or the cameras and their cables, officers said. It meant that the Amreli Police would have to manually check each road out of this intersection, and hope to find private cameras that may have captured Jamre and the abducted child. After checking more than 40 privately-owned cameras in the area, installed at shops, petrol pumps, and other commercial establishments, police realised they had hit a wall. It was now late in the night on September 7. And then, the team saw something that they had not noticed earlier – two cameras, mounted on a pole on the divider of the highway, about 100 metres from Dhareshwar chowkdi in the direction of the Pithadia toll plaza and, ultimately, Rajkot. There was another such pole on the other side of the intersection as well – towards Dumiyani toll plaza, 50 km away in the direction of Porbandar. After getting information that access to these devices lay with the operator of the Dumiyani toll plaza, the Amreli team showed up there. Once they reached, however, they found that the private operator had access to footage from as many as 180 cameras. If police had to track down the motorcycle, they had no option but to go through the footage from all of them. So they went camera by camera, Omdevsinh said – until they had scanned footage from all but four of them. And then, in the 176th out of the 180 cameras, they found their target. Lalit Jamre was seen on NH27, riding towards Rajkot city. Having picked up the trail again, the officers went back along the highway, towards the Pithadia toll plaza. They checked 10 private road-facing cameras along the way and finally, the ones at Pithadia. Sure enough, Jamre had crossed the toll plaza. “After Pithadia toll plaza, we went ahead checking footage from private CCTVs of wayside hotels. In some places, the systems were working but they had no screens to watch the footage, so we had to borrow screens from other establishments,” Omdevsinh said. “Finally, Jamre and the child were spotted passing by BPCL’s Shree Dwarkesh petrol pump,” the officer said. But then, the team ran into a 10-km dark spot – an area with no surveillance footage. “There were no CCTV cameras after the petrol pump. Some work was ongoing on the road. We didn’t find another camera for 10 km,” Omdevsinh said. Finally, the team came across a factory camera pointing towards the road. But the time stamp on this system was running 17 minutes late. Ahead, there was a flyover, and below that, a road turned into Virpur, the birthplace of the saint Jalaram Bapa, and a popular pilgrimage town full of inexpensive hotels and guesthouses. While such locations usually have a dense network of CCTV cameras, Virpur has been surveyed only recently for the VISWAS 3.0 scheme. The investigators would have to rely almost entirely on private cameras. There are two roads going into the town – one towards the temple, the other towards the police station. Footage from a hotel’s camera showed Jamre and the child had taken the second road. Some distance ahead, the police found a garage in a lane, with two cameras facing the road. “It was the middle of the night. But we called them and asked them to come,” an officer said. It turned out to be worth the effort – in the footage from one of the cameras, the bike was spotted. “We could not see the number plate but we did see the child in the bright orange T-shirt,” the officer said. Further ahead, there were more cameras the team was able to access. But the problem of faulty timestamps persisted. “At 5.30 am on September 8, 2026, the CCTV system at a scrapyard on the way showed a timestamp of 10.22 pm on a January day of the year 2000. It took a lot of time to calculate the timings to check when Jamre could have passed this area,” Omvedsinh said. The team figured out that the bike had turned into a residential area. “There were three cameras there – but one of them had a faulty memory card, while the other two were found turned off or non-functional,” the officer said. CCTV surveillance and prediction analysis of Jamre’s moves had got the team very close now. But ultimately, it was old-fashioned human intelligence that helped them reach the end of their search. “A worker at a food distribution place recognised photos of Jamre and the child taken from the surveillance footage, and said he had fed them for the last two days,” Omvedsinh said. “Checking CCTV footage from the vicinity, the team saw the man and the child. They realised that the alleged kidnapper was actually in the vicinity,” he said. At 6.30 am, 48 hours after the alleged kidnapping, Jamre and the child were found. Police said Jamre told interrogators that he had developed a bond with the child, and had intended to take him to Madhya Pradesh. He had gone to Jetpur to borrow some money from his sister, and had then come to Virpur to meet an acquaintance with the same request. Having failed at both places, he was planning his next move when the police caught up with him. The Indian Express spoke with DGP N N Komar, who has been the head of the VISWAS Task Force since 2018. Komar is currently the Commissioner of Police, Vadodara. ON CCTV COVERAGE: 19,000 cameras have been set up across 100 major cities and towns in the first two phases of VISWAS. Cameras have been set up at 79 interstate checkposts in Phase 2, 61 of which are now live. These roads go to Rajasthan, MP, and Maharashtra. Phase 3 is currently under consideration. ON PRIVATE CAMERAS: On the addition of public-facing private cameras and how they complement the VISWAS system, Komar said, “Private establishments with a certain footfall should install cameras at entry and exit. Under the Gujarat Public Safety Measures Enforcement Act, 2022, it is mandatory for shops and establishments, hospitals, universities, cinema halls, hotels, and other publicly accessed private places in urban centres having footfall of more than 1,000 to have CCTV systems.” ON COVERAGE GAP IN RURAL AREAS: Komar agreed that there is a gap in CCTV coverage in rural areas. However, he said, “Police have multiple investigation methods and CCTV is meant to hamper the mobility of criminals. So there may not be CCTV cameras in every village.” According to Komar, “Intermittently, if criminals or suspects go off the radar, they will come back into coverage at some point, and we have an alert system for vehicles that are being tracked. Some panchayats have taken initiatives, and there are cameras at wayside hotels and toll plazas. Gujarat Police: 19,000 Other Depts: 60,000 Privately-owned: 1,00,000 VISWAS PROJECT Phase 1 7,000 cameras in 41 cities including all Municipal Corporations and major cities 10,000 body-worn cameras in 772 police stations 34 Netram and 1 Trinetra Command and Control Centres Phase 2 2,000 cameras in 54 cities including Tier-2 cities and towns 411 cameras at 79 interstate checkpoints Phase 3 Will include coverage of 54 Tier-3 Nagarpalikas and smaller towns. Number of Cameras and support infrastructure under consideration