meerut dont be surprised if one of these days you are out for a drive on meerut roads and instead of a traffic cop you spot a shining metallic robot conducting traffic at a busy intersection thats the new initiative meerut police plans to implement the top police officials in the region have come up with a proposal to begin a pilot project involving the use of robots on traffic crossings in meerut making the city the first in the country to try out such a unique plan the project is the brainchild of dig meerut range ramit sharma who is also an engineering graduate he says we have been trying to come up with ways to utilize technology in a way that it makes policing easier the idea behind this initiative is that we can use small bust robots on selected crossings and points in the city we simply have to synchronise them with the existing traffic signals at those points and the robot will then stand in the middle managing the flow of traffic this will mean that the traffic cop who had to stand in the middle of the crossing will now be free to monitor traffic and issue challans the proposal has received a goahead from the additional director general technical of up police and is all set to go on the floors soon the final modalities will be finalized in a meeting between the dig and the adg on the 17th of this month the robots to be used for this project will be acquired from engineering colleges in the region the dig says in colleges where there is a branch for robotics within the mechanical engineering wing students create small functional robots as part of their final year projects we can utilize these projects for this purpose the idea is to decrease the workload of the traffic cop on the crossings he further elaborates ill be writing to the engineering colleges in meerut later this month asking for their contribution in the project in case we do not get suitable responses from meerut itself we will expand the search to colleges from geographically suitable alternative locations like noida and ghaziabad the robots to be used will be acquired from engineering colleges in the region in case responses dont come from meerut search will expand to noida and ghaziabad initially the initiative will be treated as a pilot project and run on a test basis on selected crossings in the city the dig tells us to start with things we will identify a couple of crossings where the traffic is not very heavy this will allow us to monitor the efficacy of the project easily this is not something that we need to run for a year to get results we should be able to judge how successful this is within a month or so so as soon as we get the robots we will start rolling things out in the past too meerut police