Visitors will get to know the wait time to enter a puja pandal if an app developed by Kolkata police delivers as it promises.
Lalbazar has identified 15 big-ticket pujas where it will engage two personnel who will provide real-time data to the app that will calculate the time people take to enter and exit a pandal.
“The app will help our personnel calculate the time that the tail of a particular queue takes to enter and leave a pandal. Accordingly, we will be posting alerts about the estimated time that visitors might take at a given point of time to visit a particular pandal,” said a senior police officer. “This will help pandal goers plan their visits accordingly.”
Armed with the calculator app, one person will be at the gate where a crowd has queued up, the other will walk down to assess the time taken for visitors at the exit.
This exercise will be carried out every 20 minutes. The police will convey what the app has thrown up using different mediums about the possible time to cover a particular pandal.
Senior officers behind this plan said it is for four days starting Sashthi, October 20.
Several puja organisers welcomed the move but some were also sceptical about whether the “real-time feed” by two cops on the ground would be reliable.
“This sounds good on paper but the whole application will have to take the test of time to clear the hurdles,” said a puja organiser in Central Kolkata.
The app for police use is already ready and several
training sessions have been conducted with the members of the police force, an officer said.