Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president K Sudhakaran announced that his party will observe a hunger strike across the state on June 5 over the alleged corruption in the installation of Artificial Intelligence-enabled cameras for traffic surveillance.
Sudhakaran also made a scathing attack against the LDF government and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan over the controversy.
“LDF government is fully corrupt. Pinarayi Vijayan was not an iniquitous person. But now he also turned into a corrupt chief minister,” the KPCC president alleged.
The Congress has claimed that the AI camera project should have cost less than Rs 100 crore, but was completed at double the cost of Rs 232 crore.
The opposition party leaders have been alleging that the Left government had indulged in irregularities in awarding the tender to SRIT, a private company for setting up a fully-automated traffic enforcement system.
The Kerala government had in 2020 entered into an agreement with Keltron for the project.
In April this year, Vijayan had inaugurated the 'Safe Kerala' project, which included installation of the AI cameras, envisaged to reduce road accidents and traffic violations in the state.
Rubbishing the allegations, Industries Minister P Rajeeve had said the tender process was completely transparent. At a press meet here, Rajeeve cited the report filed in this regard by Industries Department principal secretary, and said all the concerned documents in connection with the project were in public domain.
"State-run KELTRON's tender process for the Safe Kerala project was completely transparent and all due procedures were followed. All concerned documents are in public domain as those were uploaded in the e-portal from then itself," the minister said.
He pointed out that except for the data security, data integrity and configuration of technical management equipment, the agreement permits subcontracts for all other processes. The agreement is between Keltron and the private company. However, the report has observed that there was no need to mention the sub-contractors in the agreement,” Rajeeve said.
