New Delhi: Five to six people work quietly on computers in a room with big screens showing live information and visuals. Onlookers may mistake it as any other surveillance centre. Welcome to the Aviation Security Control Centre (ASCC) of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).
To put things in perspective, the ASCC is the backbone of the CISF’s entire security and management apparatus of 66 domestic and international airports in India that the force secures.
Inaugurated in July at the CISF’s Mahipalpur campus, the control centre allows the CISF to provide a new dimension to the security preparedness at the airports managed by the force.
Aviation Security Control Centre with state of art technology, inaugurated by Hon’ble Home & Minister of Cooperation Shri Amit Shah @ CISF Complex Mahipalpur, Delhi. A milestone for technical upgradation & advancement for the tech savvy force. @AmitShah @HMOIndia @MoCA_GoI pic.twitter.com/eBzzvN1lsS
— CISF (@CISFHQrs) July 22, 2023
The ASCC idea came into being after the CISF setup, which had to go for virtual meetings in the pandemic, decided that a stop-gap arrangement of keeping a virtual tab on airports should have a long-term solution. To bring it from concept to reality, the CISF brought together men and machines to set up this command centre at the Airport Sector Headquarters in New Delhi.
How the idea came about
There are two broader objectives behind the establishment of this control centre, CISF officers told ThePrint.
The first one, one of the CISF officers explained, is to enhance the experience of air travellers on a daily basis and the other is to prepare for contingency measures in the likelihood of any emerging threat.
As technology lies at the core of this idea, the officer explained, it is adopted at every level — from entry of travellers at airports to their movement from the first checkpoint to check-in area — to receive real time data at the control centre. This data is then analysed to evaluate a possible trend emerging in any portion of the airport, and information is relayed back to the supervising officers.
Previously, daily incident reports were sent to the airport headquarters but with the launch of this centre, all airports were instructed not to sit on any “imperative information”.
Elaborating it further, the officer said information was relayed earlier to the headquarters over phone or through email and there used to be a gap as not every top CISF officer had the luxury of accessing all information at one go. Now, with this centre, real time data is stored and analysed, and this could lead to better policy planning by the CISF headquarters and also at the airport security headquarters.
The ASCC has four components — Communication and Monitoring Centre, Incident Management Centre, Aviation Research Centre and Data Centre.
War room and analysis
The CISF uses two in-house made softwares — Management Information System (MIS) and Airport Information System (AIS) — for storage of real time data. The Data Centre has a storage capacity of 300 TB.
Another official involved in operations of the control centre told ThePrint that three sets of passenger data — waiting time, congestion, and gadget usage — are received by the control centre from airports.
To monitor waiting time and movements of passengers, the CISF uses a queue management system (QMS) from a third party operator which gives two and three dimensional pictures of the crowds and their movements.
Passengers and different checkpoints from which they need to pass through are divided into different blocks. Analysts sitting at the airports headquarters can monitor the time that passengers take in real time to move from one block to another. This calculation is done in real time and if it is more than what is fixed as average time, supervisors at airports are asked to “up their game”.
Though this QMS is limited to airports in Mumbai, New Delhi and Bengaluru, ThePrint has learnt that the CISF is looking to expand it to other airports.
Currently, “periodic” seeding of passenger data is done by CISF personnel in the AIS at 63 airports. The CISF personnel are also tasked to upload photos and videos of congestion and crowding when they feed data into the AIS.
Analysts in the control centre explained that the MIS provides daily situation reports, which is a consolidated report of daily situation reports filed by all airports, while AIS is more of a real-time data management system. Both these systems are connected to dashboards, which give a picture of airport situations at the sector headquarters.
“We are monitoring real time data on passenger movement to find out waiting time from three airports at the Airport Sector HQ through QMS. Our officers at other airports provide data periodically to ensure smooth analysis by the command centre to improve the system continuously. We are striving to equip other airports with similar technology to make them more efficient,” a CISF officer told ThePrint.
Not limited to data from CISF alone
The CISF officers in know-how of this centralised monitoring system said that they solely do not rely on their personnel alone and thus keep an eye on other tools as well to spot trends. For this, they monitor news channels and social media to stay aware of the developments around the airports across the country.
A CISF officer told ThePrint that airports don’t operate “in silos” and that activities and developments in and around the area affect the overall security and, hence, a complete overview is needed to ensure smooth functioning of airports.
“Sometimes it might happen that CISF staff at an airport have no idea of what is unfolding outside, but there could be serious situations such as law and order crisis or riot-like situation which can have spillover effects. The officers need to be briefed about the impending situation for contingency planning,” he said.
Monitoring of social media is done by every agency, but the CISF officer told ThePrint that they do it in a more “professional” way. A software monitoring system scans as many as 11 social media networks simultaneously for keywords, the officer said, adding that whenever any post has these keywords, it is flagged in every round of scan.
The scan is done “periodically” daily as part of a SOP, while a consolidated report comes daily giving a full picture of “lapses” highlighted by social media users.
Dealing with exigencies
The CISF officials explained that all airport-related information is kept under the Incident Management System (IMS) for dealing with emergencies.
Under the IMS, the control centre has information of all critical locations which are digitally mapped, in a city. Information about institutional mechanisms for dealing with specific crises is also fed into the system.
“If there is any crisis situation, senior officers seek a blueprint of the affected area and contingency measures. Earlier, we did not have an institutional mechanism where critical airport-related information was readily accessible. Now, our top brass will get to know how soon any contingency force can arrive, what can be the primary mode of defence, and what can be the plan in case there is any terror-related emergency. This can have a huge impact on our preparedness,” the officer told ThePrint.
A CISF officer told ThePrint that this idea of overhauling the monitoring of airports and technological apparatus required for it was the brainchild of CISF Additional Director General, Airport Security, Pramod Phalnikar.
Phalnikar arrived in Delhi in 2020 and noticed something was amiss at the headquarters of the airport sector that needed to be on the top of the game throughout the day. The control centre resembled a “rural police station” when Phalnikar arrived, the officer said.
The ADG envisaged having a round-the-clock control centre and handpicked CISF officers from various airports who had understanding of technology and teamed them up with tech savvy people .
When ThePrint reached for details of the project, Phalnikar said the ASCC was a major hallmark of the upgradation of Indian airport security apparatus. The CISF decided to develop in-house softwares and there was architecture for the installation of new technologies at the sector headquarters, he said.
The Airport security (APS) sector of the CISF is the only agency in the country to have this level of “elaborate and actionable information on aviation matters”, he said.
“This centre is a major landmark in many ways. Firstly, (because of) the physical structure and the technical hardware installed in it. This aspect was very important because the kind of informational jump we intended to take, needed to be supported with appropriate hardware architecture. Secondly, the information gathering and monitoring needed elaborate software to be developed which we decided to do in house,” Phalnikar told ThePrint.
“All these would take the quality of actionable information in APS to a higher benchmark. … We also intend to develop it further for e-learning and similar projects.”
The senior IPS officer said that the control centre will eventually make passengers’ experience easier and enhance CISF preparedness in dealing with any security or operational crises that may come while guarding and operating the airports.
“I am sure the ASCC will add to CISFs effective operational and aviation security preparedness and response to any emerging situations and, therefore, will lead to enhanced passenger satisfaction,” Phalnikar said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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