The Uttar Pradesh (UP) prison department received the prestigious FICCI Smart Policing award for 2021 thanks to their exemplary work using an artificial intelligence (AI) platform JARVIS.

The UP prison department is the first state to use AI to monitor prisoners and to monitor the COVID-19 situation of the inmates; so far the department has recorded zero casualties in UP prisons during the pandemic. 

While speaking to India Today, DG prison administration and reform services Anand Kumar said, "With immense pleasure, I can say it's a matter of pride as UP is the only state in the country who got this award in the prison category."

"We used artificial intelligence for monitoring prisons. We are the only state in the county to use software and artificial intelligence for monitoring prisons. We also did Covid-19 management with this be it distributing masks, medicines which resulted in no casualties in prisons," he added.

JARVIS: AI has been powering the video surveillance and monitoring software of 71 jails under the UP Jail department since December 2019 which are monitored by senior jail officials in the headquarters. The software has helped the jailers in disciplining and overseeing the prisoners in the past one and a half years. 

"We are the only state in the country to harness artificial intelligence for prison monitoring and supervision...Despite having around 1,10,000 jail inmates in Uttar Pradesh which is 24 per cent of India's jail inmate population, we took all preventive measures, everything was in CCTV owing to this. We were able to monitor everything," Anand Kumar said.

Notably, the FICCI Smart Policing Award ceremony, hosted annually, aims to promote the initiatives taken by police departments of India for the safety and security of citizens.