The Government of India plans one of the largest Facial Recognition Systems in the World

The Indian Government released a Request for Proposal to bidder companies to procure a national Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS). AFRS companies had time to submit their proposals until the end of January 2020. The plans for an AFRS in India are a new political development amidst the intention to pass the first national Data Protection Bill in Parliament.

The new system is supposed to integrate image databases of public authorities centrally as well as incorporate photographs from newspapers, raids, mugshots and sketches. The recordings from surveillance cameras, public or private video feeds shall then be compared to the centralised databases and help identify criminals, missing persons and dead bodies.

Human rights and privacy groups are pointing to various risks that may come with implementing nationwide AFRS in India, including violations of privacy, arbitrariness, mis-identifications, discriminatory profiling, a lack of technical safeguards, and even creating an Orwellian 1984 dystopia through mass surveillance.

However, many people in India are receiving the news about the plans of the Government with acceptance and approval. They hope that the AFRS will lead to better law enforcement and more security in their everyday lives, as India has a comparably high crime rate and only 144 police officers for every 100.000 citizens, compared to 318 per 100.000 citizens in the EU.