On Tuesday, the Supreme Court's suo motu proceedings over non-functional CCTV cameras in police stations reached a critical pressure point as Attorney General R. Venkataramani, appearing before a Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta on behalf of the Union Home Secretary, gave a firm two-week assurance that all outstanding issues would be resolved through structured meetings with the Amicus Curiae, Senior Advocate Sidharth Dave, and senior government officials. The commitment comes against a backdrop of eleven reported custody deaths in eight to nine months, and a five-year-old Supreme Court mandate on CCTV installation that remains, in large parts of the country, a promise on paper.
The seeds of this confrontation were planted in December 2020, when the Apex Court in Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh directed every State and Union Territory to install functional CCTV cameras across all police stations, a direction aimed squarely at curbing custodial abuse and ensuring accountability within the walls of law enforcement facilities. Five years on, compliance remained dangerously uneven. In September 2025, a Dainik Bhaskar report documenting eleven custody deaths in under a year prompted the Court to register a suo motu case and take direct ownership of the issue.
As proceedings progressed, a picture of stark disparity emerged: while Kerala, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh had developed dashboard-based live monitoring systems, states like Uttar Pradesh were still in the process of establishing even basic infrastructure. Kerala's model, a fully implemented, live-feed software system, was identified by the Amicus as the gold standard, prompting the Court to press the Centre on why a nationally uniform adoption of that model was not being pursued instead of allowing each state to independently build its own parallel system. The Court's frustration was further sharpened when it emerged that Union representation at a critical committee meeting had been delegated to an Under Secretary, a rank the bench found wholly inadequate given the gravity of the judicial intervention underway.
Justice Vikram Nath made the bench's exasperation unmistakably clear on both fronts, the technological fragmentation and the bureaucratic disregard. On the CCTV architecture, the Court's position was direct and practical: "Yesterday, it came out that Kerala has come out with a very nice software and implemented it fully. So we were requesting the ASG why can't you follow in all states instead of all states creating their own? According to Amicus, Kerala, MP and Rajasthan have already implemented and Kerala has the best." On the question of the Union's representation at official meetings, Justice Nath delivered a pointed institutional rebuke, questioning whether it was appropriate for an Under Secretary to represent the Union when the Supreme Court had constituted a committee, appointed an Amicus, and issued specific directions for high-level engagement.
The Attorney General tendered an apology for his absences and clarified that the Under Secretary's deputation was not intended as a signal of indifference. The Court recorded the AG's undertaking in its order, directing that within two weeks, the AG would hold regular meetings with the Amicus and the Home Secretary to ensure all issues are conclusively addressed.
Source PTI
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