Chennai: Security for Tiruvannamalai Lord Arunachaleshwarar temple, where lakhs of people are expected to gather for the Karthigai deepam festival on Monday, has been stepped up this time.
The police will be using three drones and Wi-Fi supported surveillance CTTVs that can be monitored sitting in the police headquarters in Chennai. Apart from three UAVs and internet supported monitoring of the crowd, 15,000 police personnel have been deployed at the festival venue to make sure no untoward incident happens, particularly after the arrest of activists of Base Movement, an outfit of Al-Qaida sympathisers, from Madurai and Chennai. Though there is no specific alert, police are in no mood to leave anything to chances.
With the state police pooling the service of number of inspectors general at Tiruvannamalai, UAVs are beling used to map the temple town with the help of a team of scholars headed by a Anna University professor.
Inspector-general of police (north zone) N.K. Senthamarai Kannan is supervising the whole situation, while IG M.C. Sarangan has been assigned as the special control room officer, IG Davidson Devasirvatham will look after the district traffic flow, IG Shanmugarajeshwaran will handle the rural city traffic flow, IG S Periaiah will monitor the Girivalam road.
