Traffic-i-cop is the BlackBerry-developed system that helps city police search for stolen vehicles and traffic offenders. It was designed by a team of 30 developers, and won the award for 'Best Innovative Project/Technological Application' from the Ministry of Urban Development at the beginning of December.
It was first implemented in Pune city for 13 months, and achieved wide positive feedback. Its very first success was helping to capture four people who beat up a bus driver and left him badly injured, after a dispute over the bus driver flashing his headlights. The offenders got out of their vehicle and proceeded to beat up the bus driver with iron rods, before fleeing the scene.
The bus driver immediately complained at a nearby police station, and the police enter the car registration details into the Traffic-i-cop system. It fed back the name and address of the owner of the car. This allowed the police to arrest the offenders just 15 minutes after the incident occurred, a procedure which could have taken hours using old methods.
The Traffic-i-cop system is developed purely for Blackberry, who released the BlackBerry 9790(nicknamed the BlackBerry Bellagio) across India at the beginning of December. Traffic-i-cop's success means that it is set to be implemented in other cities like Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Kolkata and Cochin. Since the traffic rule is a state issue, the application needs to be tweaked for each instance, and so the development is at various stages for each city. Following widespread interest, BlackBerry are also in talks to extend the application to other cities in India.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com, indianexpress.com