Allied Digital develops mobile application for Pune Safe City project

The city of Pune is known for its traffic woes. The Pune Police has embarked on a major initiative to improve traffic conditions, especially related to citizen safety. However, the Pune Metro Area Police has limited resource on the roads. Hence, they wanted to seek help from the citizens to report such cases, so that appropriate actions could be taken.

They planned development of a mobile application for citizens, who can report traffic violations, incidents and traffic related information. The mobile application for citizens should serve the cause, where citizens can capture information of the incident in the form of multiple pictures, set priority, add text message and send to the police back-end traffic monitoring system, which is supervised by the traffic control room. The police would analyse the incidents and take appropriate action, including issuing e-challans for collecting fines on traffic offences.

Allied Digital has implemented the Pune Safe City project. There were several challenges in developing such application, inclusing budgetary challenges, as it is for the common public; huge scalability requirement; backend queuing of incidents for analysis and approvals; integration with the existing Pune Safe City traffic command centre; integration with RTO for getting owner details and e-challan system to issue penalty; escalation within the police network.

The solution was developed and tested on iOS and Android. The application has capabilities to take multiple pictures, geo co-ordinates, registration of each application user, and optimisation of bandwidth to send the data securely to the central server. The solution, Satark Punekar, for traffic violations, was launched in 2019 and has become a huge success.

Allied Digital has developed the mobile application using Apache Cordova technology for the end user devices and PCS Console application using Microsoft WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) for Pune Traffic Station to get list of alerts and generate tickets. Scalability, inter-operability, high availability, bandwidth utilisation were the critical parameters.

Since citizens could send multiple pictures, Allied Digital has developed a special compression mechanism to optimise the bandwidth usage and storage technique to store thousands of images. The application had to work on 3G/4G on multiple types of phones. Being a mobile app, upgrades needed to be easy. To ensure the same, Allied Digital developed a special test bed to ensure smooth upgrades for new features and OS version compatibility.

The mobile application is running for over months now, and thousands of citizens have started using it actively, with over two lakh violations already reported and fines collected. There is now a proactive attempt by Pune citizens to obey traffic rules and a mechanism is now in place to report incidents immediately to the police with the geographic location.

The police is making its active use in various situations including acting on violations and incidents and driving investigations. DCP, Traffic Pune, Tejaswi Satpute said that traffic cops cannot remain present at all the 1350 chowks in the city hence the app is very helpful. Pune Police Commissioner K Venkatesham commented that fatal accidents have reduced by 23 per cent as compared to previous year. The target is to achieve 50 per cent reduction in fatalities.