When Modi announced the idea of creating 100 smart Indian cities, it created waves in the video surveillance and security market. A city has to be safe, after all, to be smart.

“There are so many places where the police is not present. Take the recent case of a minister in Delhi who died in an accident. Had there been a CCTV camera there, the world could have known what exactly happened, how it happened, and when it happened,” says Sudhindra Holla, country manager at Axis Communications, one of the many security surveillance and remote monitoring companies that are betting big on smart city projects.

Video surveillance can be used to monitor traffic and over the long term, lower cases of people breaking the law.

Today’s CCTV cameras are smart, Holla says. The moment they find someone passing a red light, for instance, today’s camera can automatically zoom in, take a picture, and send it to the concerned authority, who can, in turn, use it as proof.

Surat is a case in point to understand how video surveillance can be effectively used for citizen service.

It is the only city in India which has deployed 104 state-of-the-art cameras in 23 locations and is planning to deploy 5,000 more.

Surat also has the largest video wall in the country, measuring 280 square feet, to supervise videos generated by the surveillance cameras.