Western Coalfields Limited — a Coal India subsidiary — engaged SMIPL to transform its fragmented, area-level CCTV into a unified, AI-enabled command ecosystem. The result became the benchmark ICCC deployment for Indian mining, designed to scale from 500 cameras to 1,000+ and built to operate 24×7 on a six-year SLA.
Western Coalfields Limited operates open-cast and underground mines across central India — stretching through Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh with coal stockyards, railway sidings, weighbridges, explosive magazines and sensitive check-posts distributed across hundreds of remote locations in the Wardha Valley and Pench Valley coalfields.
Before this project, WCL's surveillance was a fragmented estate of 500 IP cameras and 10 area-level 64-channel NVRs — each mining area operating as an independent island. There was no centralised visibility from WCL Nagpur HQ. Connectivity ran over IP radio and leased lines. CCTV was recording — but nobody was watching, and nothing was being analysed.
Theft of coal, safety violations at loading points, unauthorised vehicle movement at weighbridges, and crowding at check-posts all went largely undetected until after the fact. Critical incidents depended on manual detection. Manual review of thousands of hours of footage was impossible. WCL needed a single pane of glass — one command centre, AI-enabled, streaming live from every vulnerable location, with automated event detection replacing human review.
WCL didn't ask for another CCTV vendor. They asked for an operational intelligence partner — one who could transition them from reactive surveillance to proactive, automated intelligence. That changed everything about how this project was scoped.
— Project Scope Note · SMIPL Engineering TeamSMIPL delivered an end-to-end ICCC build — designed, supplied, installed, commissioned and now operated by SMIPL engineers. The architecture is federated: each of the 10 operational Areas keeps a local 64-channel NVR for resilience with 30 days of distributed recording, while the central ICCC at WCL's Nagpur HQ aggregates all live feeds, analytics events and alerts into a single unified command view with a further 15 days of central retention.
The unified command view sits at WCL HQ Nagpur. All 10 area NVRs — Nagpur, Kanhan, Majri, Pench, Pathakhera, Wani North, Chandrapur, Wani, Ballarpur and Umrer — stream into the HQ over secure connectivity. Operators view, playback, investigate and export footage from one console. A 6-panel video wall shows live multi-site feeds; operators can drill into any camera on the dashboard, any time, in seconds.
The Video Management System runs on a client-server architecture, ONVIF-compliant so WCL is never locked to a single camera OEM. Each VMS server handles 250 cameras, and the deployed capacity is scalable to 1,000+ cameras with no architectural rework. Core capabilities delivered to the operator: live monitoring, smart playback, multi-screen display, tamper-proof export, role-based access control with full audit logs.
The platform runs multiple analytics models concurrently across the camera estate, converting a passive recording system into a proactive alerting system:
The HQ deployment is engineered for high availability and future scale: high-performance dual-Xeon servers with 128 GB RAM, 74 TB enterprise NAS storage, next-generation firewall (NGFW), managed layer-3 switches, and a 6-panel video wall configuration. Every layer is designed to be replaceable without downtime, and expandable without re-architecture.
A dedicated ICCC room was built out at WCL HQ Nagpur — acoustics, lighting, ergonomics, power and HVAC engineered for round-the-clock operator use. SMIPL deploys trained operators in three shifts, 24×7, with a 98% uptime SLA and a six-year operational commitment ⟨ 1 year warranty + 5 year CAMC ⟩.
★ India's 1st · WCL
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Project film — Integrated Command & Control Centre · Western Coalfields Limited · Nagpur HQ
The WCL ICCC drew the attention of the Hon'ble Coal Minister of India, who reviewed the operational deployment at WCL headquarters. The project has since been briefed to senior Coal India leadership as a reference implementation, including visits by WCL's E&T department head and senior officers. The success at WCL established SMIPL as a trusted delivery partner within the Coal India ecosystem — and directly led to the independent SECL ICCC engagement.
SMIPL's ICCC deployment for WCL transformed the surveillance estate of India's first AI-enabled coal-industry ICCC — 500+ cameras live, 10 Areas federated, 10 concurrent analytics types, 24×7 manned command at Nagpur HQ, and a 6-year operational commitment that remains the benchmark for Indian mining digitalisation.
A single-pane-of-glass view across all 10 WCL operational Areas from Nagpur HQ, replacing 10 fragmented NVR islands. Decisions now made on live data, not retrospective footage review.
Automated alerts for intrusion, crowd detection, wrong-way movement, camera tampering and PPE compliance enable intervention in minutes, not hours — fundamentally shifting WCL's safety posture.
ANPR, loading-state analytics and entry/exit tracking at weighbridges create an auditable digital log of every truck movement — directly supporting dispatch accuracy and anti-pilferage controls across the coalfield.
SMIPL's engineering team works directly with procurement, plant and IT leaders to scope, design and deliver mission-critical systems. No call centres. No middle layers.
