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India Is Creating A National Facial Recognition System

Siddhant T. is a lawyer who is so concerned about his privacy that he wanted his name changed for this story. And so, when an airline representative at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi airport suggested he check in with his face for a flight to Bangalore in September, he bristled  —  and then declined. The representative looked confused and called a befuddled supervisor, who repeated what his colleague had said.

 just sort of looked at them in disbelief,” said Siddhant, “and then shuffled off immediately to check in an old-fashioned way.”

Later that day, he posted a picture of his boarding pass to his Instagram. “I was just told that I could use my face to print [my] boarding pass,” he wrote. “How the f do [they] have my biometric data? Are they permitted to use it for shit like this?”

They are.On Sept. 6, New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi airport became the fourth airport in India to test a facial recognition system to let passengers board by letting a machine scan their faces. The tech is scheduled to roll out at all the major airports in the country in the next few years. The government calls it “Digi Yatra” —  Digital Journey  —  and it is a partnership between India’s federal aviation ministry and private companies. The aim, according to a 2018 government document, is to use biometric data — the curves of passengers’ faces, the tilts of their noses — to create a “digital travel experience.”

It isn’t just airports. Hundreds of Indian police stations, malls, and schools already use a patchwork of facial recognition systems powered by tech from dozens of private companies, and major cities have rushed to install hundreds of thousands of closed-circuit cameras on street corners.

And in the eyes of critics, each camera is another knot in this tightening mesh over India, in which facial recognition tech, a national biometric ID system, and weak data privacy laws are creating a surveillance state in a country ruled by a populist right-wing government.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party has surveillance ambitions to rival the most advanced in the world. India’s National Crime Records Bureau is in the midst of collecting bids from private companies to create the country’s first centralized facial recognition surveillance system. Once it’s up and running — the NCRB hasn’t specified a time frame for its launch — it will be linked with more than a dozen databases, although it is unclear at this point whether Aadhaar, India's biometric ID database that has drawn criticism for enabling nationwide surveillance on the country's 1.3 billion citizens, would be one of them.