Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Monday inaugurated the state of-the art Bhubaneswar Operations Centre (BOC), besides two other projects and laid the foundation stone for another two.

The ultra modern command and control centre for the city and the new Smart City Office was inaugurated and Smart Parks dedicated to the people while City wide Solar Powered Adaptive Traffic Signal System was also launched as Bhubaneswar marched ahead in its plan of becoming a Smart City.

The Chief Minister also laid the foundation stone for a Sensory Park for children with special needs, in Saheed Nagar and an Integrated Public Service Centre (IPSC) at Bapuji Nagar.

Water Resources, Housing and Urban Development (H&UD) Minister Niranjan Pujari, Odia Language, Literature, Culture and Tourism Minister Ashok Chandra Panda, Bhubaneswar MP Dr. Prasanna Kumar Patsani, MLA Bhubaneswar (Central) Bijaya Kumar Mohanty, MLA Bhubaneswar (North) Priyadarshi Mishra, Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena and local councillors of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) were present.

The first-of-its-kind centralized command and control centre will monitor, operate, and control existing services of the city. The Adaptive Traffic Signal System, tracking of buses and municipal vehicles along with Grievance Redressal System is being operationalised at present from BOC.

The operations centre is envisaged to be developed further in a manner to keep an eye on several functions like traffic management, incident management, city surveillance, emergency services and disaster management.

The state-of-the-art centre includes a massive video wall of more than 80-foot length (with 16 x 2 configuration of 70 inch panels) and will be used to monitor the large volume of close circuit television (CCTV) footage and highly sophisticated sensor data.

Official sources informed six neighbourhood parks in Saheed Nagar area have been redesigned by Bhubaneswar Urban Knowledge Centre as interactive play spaces for children with several child friendly smart features.

As far as the Solar Powered Adaptive Traffic Signal System, the officers said it is an intelligent and IT-based signalisation of traffic intersections in the city which will include traffic signal control system along with provision of pelican signals and blinkers implemented on city level.

The latest Composite SignalControl Strategy (CoSi- CoSt) technology, used here, has been developed by Trivandrum- based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

The city now has 50 Intersections, 8 Pelicans and 5 blinkers and shall also be maintained for next 7 years by Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited. Bill payment centre, dispensary, crèche, library, multipurpose hall etc will be part of the Integrated Public Service Centre (IPSC), stated the officials.