Railways floats fresh tender for coronavirus surveillance cameras

The Railways on Tuesday floated a fresh tender for thermal cameras for coronavirus surveillance, removing a provision which might have favoured a Chinese company.

RailTel, a Railway PSU, in its new tender for AI-based surveillance cameras, has done away with DeepinMind technology as a requirement. However, the tender retained the specification of the ability of the cameras to accurately measure temperatures emitted by a person to say whether a person has fever or not.

Additionally, the PSU also asked vendors to name the origin country of all equipment that they supply.

In case country of manufacturing is not mentioned by the bidder, RailTel Reserves the right to reject his offer, the tender document said.

Last month, RailTel had floated the tender for AI-based surveillance cameras that measure body temperatures of individuals and even detects whether a person is wearing a mask or not.

However, the tender was scrapped two weeks back after vendors complaines that specifications mentioned for the procurement of the equipment may have favoured a Chinese company Hikvision, one of the world's largest video surveillance companies which currently dominates India's CCTV market.

They said the technology -- DeepinMind -- which is part of the specification for the cameras and mentioned in the tender document, is a proprietary feature of Hikvision.

The new tender has done away with this technology as a requirement, said an official.

After a violent face-off between India and China in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh last month, the Indian Railways cancelled signalling contract given to Chinese company in Kanpur-Deen Dayal Upadhyay (DDU) section of Dedicated Freight Corridor.

Though the a Chinese-Indian JV has also emerged as one of the bidders for a tender floated for manufacturing 44 Train 18 sets, the national transporter is under pressure to disqualify the company bid as per Make in India initiative.