“IS this live?”

“Yes, Shukar Allah, they are all live!” says Mohammad Ali Arabi, chairman of Hassan Centre in Karachi’s Saddar. He is sitting in his car, watching the goings-on at his shops on his iPhone.

“I can also watch my businesses from outside the country. I do that often now that I have had surveillance cameras fixed everywhere,” he explains. “In fact, I have also put in motion sensors and pyro-sensors in my house. That way we don’t even have to be at home and the gate and lawn lights will switch on and off by themselves. They can also switch on when something moves, giving the impression that someone’s home or that the intruder has been spotted.”

Right now, he’s watching a woman sitting in a chair, turning the pages of a magazine. There is a boy coming out of a room with some newspapers. “That’s my wife there,” he says.

The businessman tells me that he can relax more after having these systems installed at his home and places of work. He is also recording everything through a digital video recording system as that way, he says, if some unforeseen incident occurs, he can always check the recorded footage. “Extortionists and those who used to threaten us also know that they are being recorded so they keep away from my shops,” he says. “In fact, most of the shops in Hassan Centre and the Rafiq Electronics Market across the road have such surveillance systems installed.”

A narrow spiral staircase leads you to the man who is said to have introduced the market and the business community to the system. There, like a character straight out of some James Bond movie, sits Saad Inam Malik in a 3ft by 6ft mezzanine-floor room. There are some 16 windows providing him different views on the monitor before him. In one window, there is the road outside, in another the entrance to the shopping centre while others show several corridors and shops.

Malik says that he knew people abroad put surveillance or closed-circuit TV cameras to good use but there was hardly any concept or awareness about such technology here, earlier. It was also thought to be way too expensive.

“Just eight years ago, installing surveillance cameras at one place would have cost you around Rs100,000 but it is 20 per cent of that today. And with the variety of android or smartphone apps available for download these days, you can monitor any place,” says the pioneer. He adds that earlier, they used to import the equipment from Dubai or Taiwan but now it is Taiwan and China.

“Right now they are trying to combat crime through these systems,” he says. “Extortionists or kidnappers are looking for business owners but who is going to entertain their demands when the business owners aren’t even there? It can be used for so many other things, such as watching your children at school, or for people who are needed at several locations but, being human, they can only be present at one,” he says, touching his iPhone screen and showing the scene at a boutique in Zamzama. “See people selecting clothes here. They don’t even know I’m watching. I have sold this system to hundreds of shops in all parts of Karachi,” he tells me.

Still, one gentleman who knows a bit more about crime is not impressed. “Cameras and apps are nothing new,” says Ahmed Chinoy, chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee. “They’ve been around for 20 years. They are installed in banks. But you still have bank robberies. The culprits’ faces are captured on camera but are we able to catch them? The crooks may be keeping away initially, but they’ll soon become brave after becoming sure that no one bothers to catch them despite being recorded.”

“These businessmen who think they may be curbing crime by staying at home and monitoring their shops and businesses from afar will sooner or later realise that their presence is needed at work,” he adds. “You can’t leave everything to your workers.”

“The thing is that even though the idea is good, it will work only if the law-enforcement agencies keep their side of the bargain and catch culprits after identifying them properly. Otherwise it is just a half-baked system — the people monitoring from afar are watching a good movie with real action.”