Inside the Umsawli ICCC: a tour for citizens

The Integrated Command and Control Centre at Umsawli — Shillong's ICCC — is a building, a wall of screens, a network of cameras, and most importantly, a small team of operators who make decisions about the city in real time.

This piece is a tour, in plain language, of what's behind the screens.

The wall

Eighty-four screens. They show the live camera feeds, the engine's congestion overlay, the weather feed, and a live grievance triage queue. Operators can pull any feed full-screen with one click.

The brain

The traffic intelligence engine — provided by TraffiCure — ingests data from the cameras, from the GPS feeds we have on city buses, from the GTFS schedule, and from a small but growing set of inductive loops we've installed at the worst junctions. It produces, every five minutes, a map of every road segment with current speed, baseline speed, and a confidence band.

Operators don't watch the map all day — that would be exhausting. They watch the alerts. The engine flags four classes: sudden congestion drops, persistent below-baseline conditions, incident detections from the cameras, and citizen-reported incidents. Each alert has a small playbook.

The hands

Twelve people, three shifts. Most of the work is coordination — getting a recovery vehicle to a breakdown, getting horticulture to trim a branch, getting a sanitation truck to a school gate. The technology helps prioritise. The people make the calls.

The plan

Phase 3 of the camera expansion is on. We're adding 65 cameras, mostly at the junctions the engine has flagged as data-gap zones. By end of the year, every junction in the inner ring will be covered.

Visitors are welcome on the first Saturday of every month. Sign-up via /about.

— ICCC Operations