Punjab Safe Cities Authority has activated an AI-based child protection system on Safe City cameras on the instructions of Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif, aimed at helping identify possible cases of child labor and out-of-school children across the province. The initiative represents an extension of the existing Safe City camera network into a new area of child welfare monitoring, using artificial intelligence to support authorities in identifying cases that would otherwise be difficult to track through manual observation alone.
According to a Safe City spokesperson, the system will use artificial intelligence to automatically monitor activities involving children around the clock and flag potential cases of child labor as they are detected through the camera network. The system will also identify children who are not wearing school uniforms during school hours, as well as students in uniform who are found outside school premises during those same hours, giving authorities a broader picture of school attendance patterns alongside child labor concerns. Once such cases are detected, the system will automatically generate alerts and send them to the relevant authorities for timely action, reducing the delay that would typically be involved in identifying and responding to such cases through conventional reporting methods.
The AI based monitoring system for identifying out-of-school children will remain active between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., a window that corresponds with typical school hours and is intended to help authorities distinguish between children who should be in school and those who may be engaged in labor or otherwise absent from educational settings during that period. The spokesperson said the initiative is aimed at helping authorities quickly identify children who may be involved in labor or remain outside school during designated school hours, allowing for more timely intervention than would be possible through periodic manual inspections or reliance on public reporting alone.
The launch of the AI based system adds to the growing use of Punjab’s Safe City camera infrastructure for purposes beyond conventional security and law enforcement monitoring, reflecting a broader trend of expanding surveillance technology into social welfare applications. By automating the detection of potential child labor and school attendance issues, the system is intended to support existing efforts by provincial authorities to address these issues more systematically, using continuous monitoring capabilities that would be difficult to replicate through human observation across the scale of camera coverage currently in place across Punjab’s cities.
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