Srinagar, Aug 18: A man had very few details to share about an accient. All he knew was that the truck that ran over his wife in Nagpur had red markings, but he couldn’t identify its size or make. Using artificial intelligence (AI), the police managed to arrest the accused within 36 hours.
The victim was able to provide “very minimal information”, Harsh Poddar, Superintendent of Police, Nagpur Rural, told NDTV.
“What was done here was that CCTV footage, or as we call it metadata, of three separate toll nakas, which were at a distance of 15-20 km from each other, was collected and it was analysed using two AI algorithms. Both of which were based on a technology called Computer Visual,” Mr Poddar told Ndtv.
On Raksha Bandhan, August 9, the man and his wife were riding a bike when a speeding truck struck them in Nagpur. The woman fell onto the road and was tragically run over by the truck, which then fled the scene. In a heartbreaking response, the man tied his wife’s body to his bike—a distressing video of the incident has since gone viral—as he made his way to their village in Madhya Pradesh.
Maharashtra has created a special purpose vehicle named MARVEL (Maharashtra Research and Vigilance for Enhanced Law Enforcement), the first state-level police AI system in the country. It is owned wholly by the state.
The officer explained that the first algorithm they did was analysed the total CCTV footage to pull out and identify trucks with red markings. The second one analysed the average speed of all these trucks to be able to give an alert as to which truck could be involved. On that basis, one truck was identified. Then a team from Nagpur rural police arrested the accused and seized the truck from the Gwalior-Kanpur highway, which is about 700 km from Nagpur. Now we arrested the accused and the case has been cracked within 36 hours using AI.
“We’ve been collaborating with 13 different departments to develop AI-driven solutions. Since data is the main fuel for artificial intelligence—and the government holds vast amounts of it—we’ve been analysing this data to build solutions that work across the entire ecosystem” the officer had told NDTV
When asked how AI differs from traditional physical investigations, the officer explained that technology significantly accelerates the process. “Data that would take hours or days to examine manually can now be analysed within minutes, helping us arrive at actionable solutions much faster,” he said.
