The Punjab government has completed the installation of surveillance cameras across all districts in the province under the Safe Cities Project, bringing the total number of deployed cameras to 17,000 and integrating feeds from 43 cities into the central monitoring system at the Punjab Safe Cities Authority headquarters. The completion marks the conclusion of a project that was initiated during the tenure of former caretaker Chief Minister Mohsin Naqvi and carried through to full provincial coverage under Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz.
The 17,000 cameras deployed across Punjab are playing a key role in crime prevention, public safety monitoring, traffic management, and the e-challaning system, with cameras installed across 43 cities now fully integrated with the central monitoring infrastructure at the Punjab Safe Cities Authority headquarters. The integration of all district-level feeds into a single command-and-control centre significantly improves the authority’s ability to coordinate responses to incidents across the province in real time, moving Punjab’s public safety architecture closer to a unified operational model rather than a collection of isolated city-level systems.
Safe Cities officials announced that the next phase of the project is set to begin soon, with plans to install more than 10,000 additional cameras across 98 tehsils, with the expansion expected to be completed at a cost approximately 50 percent lower than previous phases, reflecting improved procurement efficiency and economies of scale from the earlier rollout. Beyond the tehsil-level expansion, the final phase of the Safe Cities Project is planned to extend the surveillance network down to the union council level, which would make Punjab’s camera network one of the most geographically granular public safety monitoring systems in the country. Authorities have also revealed that private surveillance cameras are being integrated into the Safe Cities network to broaden monitoring coverage without incurring the full capital cost of installing new government-owned infrastructure, a model that allows law enforcement to benefit from existing privately operated cameras at commercial premises, housing societies, and transport hubs across the province. Experts believe the expanded network will contribute to improved crime deterrence, faster incident response, better traffic flow management, and a more efficient e-challaning operation as coverage deepens from district and tehsil level down to individual union councils.
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