Activist Bhuwan Ribhu, who works for the Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, began creating a program that matched photos of all missing children in India with photos of children living in institutions, with the aim of returning many minors back to their families.
India has just 144 police officers for every 100,000 citizens, compared to 318 per 100,000 citizens in European countries , making it particularly difficult for them to be efficient and effective with all the problems that arise. In recent years, authorities have turned to facial recognition technology to make up for the deficit.
The government now has a much more ambitious plan. It wants to build one of the world's largest facial recognition systems. The plan envisions a future in which police from all 29 districts will have access to a single, central database.
The program will match images from security cameras across the country with photos of criminals, passport photos, and images collected by organizations such as the Ministry of Development (Women and Children). The platform will also allow searches based on photos submitted by newspapers, images submitted by citizens, or artist sketches of suspected criminals.
Security forces will be equipped with portable handheld devices that will allow them to record a face and search for it in an application that contains the entire database.
The new platform can help immensely when it comes to identifying criminals and missing persons according to the document published by the National Crime Records Bureau.
It is not yet known how many companies have submitted bids to install India's national facial recognition system. About 80 vendor representatives took part in a meeting before the bid submission, which took place at the office of the National Crime Information Office in Delhi in late July. IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Accenture (ACN) have shown interest. CNN also got in touch with the three companies, but none of them were willing to comment.
Experts doubt whether India can implement such an ambitious project in such a short time frame. The system is expected to be operational in less than eight months after the contract is signed.
The creation of the central platform will not be the most difficult part. India already has a national database with photos of all criminals being pursued in the country, which is regularly updated by law enforcement agencies in the states, it just needs to be connected to the country's CCTV system.
On the other hand, for privacy advocates , this new plan is worrisome. India does not have a data protection law . It also does not plan to adopt a specific legal framework for the new facial recognition system. The fact that India’s facial recognition system could become a social policing tool, used to punish petty offenses such as public waste, is particularly worrisome.
In conclusion, therefore, India has to deal with a burning issue regarding the facial recognition system. On the other hand, however, it also has to address the issue of privacy.
