The child labor activist, who works for Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, had launched a pilot program 15 months prior to match a police database containing photos of all of India’s missing children with another one comprising shots of all the minors living in the country’s child care institutions.
Locating thousands of missing children is just one of the challenges faced by India’s overstretched police force in a nation of 1.37 billion people.
But India’s government now has a much more ambitious plan. It wants to construct one of the world’s largest facial recognition systems. The project envisions a future in which police from across the country’s 29 states and seven union territories would have access to a single, centralized database.
National database
Currently unnamed, the project would match images from the country’s growing network of CCTV cameras against a database encompassing mug shots of criminals, passport photos and images collected by agencies such as the Ministry of Women and Child Development.
The platform would also enable searches based on photos uploaded from newspapers, images sent in by the public or artist sketches of suspected criminals. It would also recognize faces on closed-circuit cameras and “generate alerts if a blacklist match is found,” according to the tender document.
Security forces would be equipped with hand-held mobile devices enabling them to capture a face in the field and search it instantly against the national database, through a dedicated app.
The new facial recognition platform “can play a very vital role in improving outcomes” when it comes to identifying criminals, missing persons and bodies, according to the document published by the National Crime Records Bureau. It will also help police forces “detect crime patterns” and aid in crime prevention, it adds.
A foreign company
It is not known how many companies have submitted bids to install India’s national facial recognition system, nor how long the government will take to consider their applications.
About 80 representatives of vendors took part in a pre-bid meeting, which took place in the National Crime Records Bureau’s Delhi office at the end of July, according to minutes of the meeting seen by CNN. They discussed how the national database would be integrated with local police platforms and whether it should be able to identify people who have had plastic surgery.
The successful bidder will most likely be a consortium made up of a foreign company and a local partner — another requirement featured is for at least one of the bidding parties to be based in India.
Having a foreign company set up such a critical part of India’s security apparatus could raise “national security issues,” worries Gupta.
Ashish P. Dhakan, Prama Hikvision’s CEO, confirmed that the company was supplying more than 140,000 CCTV cameras to New Delhi and has started installing them earlier this year.
“There is no evidence anywhere in the world, including India, to indicate that Hikvision’s products are used for unauthorized collection of information,” he told CNN. Hikvision has never conducted, nor will it conduct, any espionage-related activities for any government in the world.”
Hikvision has come under increasing scrutiny in the United States. In early October, it was included on a blacklist of 28 Chinese companies and government offices essentially barred from buying US products or importing American technology over their alleged role in facilitating human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region.
‘Technologically challenging’
Experts doubt whether India can carry off such an ambitious project in such a short time. The system is expected to go live less than eight months after the contract is signed, according to the call for bids.
“A more realistic time frame would be 12 to 18 months,” says Krishnan, who describes the project as “technologically challenging.”
Creating the centralized platform will not be the hardest part. “India already has a national database with photos of all the criminals prosecuted in the country, which is regularly updated by law enforcement agencies in the states,” he explains. “It will just need to be linked up to the country’s CCTV system.” A pilot project carried out in New Delhi proved this was feasible, Krishnan says.
Blanketing the country with enough surveillance cameras — especially advanced ones equipped with facial recognition technology — will be a much bigger challenge, he believes. India lags behind other countries in terms of installed security cameras.
“Many villages in the countryside don’t have a single surveillance camera,” says Krishnan.
“A dozen of India’s largest cities are now pretty extensively covered, and 24 more are in the process of expanding their CCTV capabilities,” says Krishnan. He adds that most railway stations are now also equipped with surveillance cameras, and the government plans to have them all covered by 2021.
“This is meaningful in India: most citizens will at some point in their life walk through a railway station,” he said.
No legal safeguards
For privacy advocates, this is worrying. “India does not have a data protection law,” says Gupta. “It is also not planning to adopt a specific legal framework for the new facial recognition system, which means it will essentially be devoid of safeguards.”
He worries India’s facial recognition system could become a tool of social policing, used to punish petty offenses such as public littering or to control the whereabouts of ethnic minorities.
Further down the line, it might even be linked up to Aadhaar, India’s vast biometric database, which contains the personal details of 1.2 billion Indian citizens, enabling India to set up “a total, permanent surveillance state,” he adds.
CNN reached out to the National Crime Records Bureau but did not receive a response.
Rights activists had argued that fingerprints and retinal scans collected under Aadhaar violated an individual’s right to privacy.
The court did, however, introduce new restrictions on how Aadhaar information could be used, including measures preventing corporate bodies from demanding data.
Caught between the need to improve its policing outcomes and to protect its citizen’s privacy, India will be walking a tightrope when it comes to building its national facial recognition database.
CNN’s Manveena Suri and Swati Gupta contributed to this report.
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