(This story originally appeared in on Sep 8, 2016)

It seems the authorities have a better chance of catching speed culprits on the Expressway if they have their eyes on the ground instead of in the skies. For, closedcircuit television (CCTV) cameras fixed along the Pune-Mumbai highway have shown to record a hundred times the number of offenders a couple of drone cameras let loose on the E-way around a week ago could detect.On Wednesday, a CCTV camera captured a BMW (Registration no. MH14FG4070) speeding at 174 km/hr when the actual speed limit for the E-way is 80 km/hr. The car was registered at the Pimpri-Chinchwad Regional Transport Office.The same day, two people died in yet another road accident on the Expressway. The speeding car was detected during a regular utility test as it was the CCTV's turn to go on trial after the drones. In a span of 21hours, a single CCTV recorded 4,185 vehicles travelling above the speed limit, while the drone experiment had found only 41 vehicles flouting the rules in a span of 48 hours."It was a trial to check the performance of the CCTV cameras on the E-way. Through this trial, we wanted to check how useful these cameras can be in terms of capturing overspeeding, lane cutting vehicles and other traffic violations on the highway. The trial was carried out at the Malavli area," superintendent of police (highway) Amol Tambe told Pune Mirror.The state government is still unsure of the technology to use in order to monitor vehicles plying on the E-way, bring overspeeders to book and curb the ever growing number of accidents along the thoroughfare But, going by the statistics, use of CCTV cameras seems to be more effective than the drone cameras. For the CCTV trial carried out on Tuesday and Wednesday, a single camera enabled with automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) was installed on the overbridge at Malavli for 21 hours to check if it can detect any overspeeding vehicles. The camera was placed in such a way that it would capture vehicular movement at the extreme right lane of the E-way. During that span, the camera captured the movement of a total of 4,224 vehicles passing from the extreme right lane, out of which 4,185 were travelling above 80 km/hr.When Mirror asked Tambe about the action in store for the overspeeding vehicles detected by the CCTV camera, he said, "This was just a trial to check the performance of the CCTV cameras. Therefore, we did not focus on taking action against the overspeeding drivers. If we want to take action, we would have to provide the live video feed of the CCTV cameras at the toll plazas, where these traffic defaulters can be caught and given proof of their violation."Tanmay Pendse — an activist who has been fighting for a safer Expressway ever since he lost his brother, Marathi TV actor Akshay Pendse, in 2012 — was also involved in the testing of the CCTV cameras. Speaking to Mirror, he said, "I feel that the trial was extremely successful as it could catch over 4,000 overspeeding vehicles in less than 24 hours. Now, we will be submitting a report based on this trial to the state government. I hope that at least now, the state would take some immediate steps to install CCTV cameras to monitor vehicular movement and take action against traffic-rule defaulters."