India has no law that expressly authorises the police to deploy live facial recognition technology at protests, religious gatherings or other public assemblies, senior lawyers told The Economic Times, warning that any such use could be open to constitutional challenge.
The question stopped being academic when a petition reached the Delhi High Court challenging what it describes as continuous surveillance of people taking part in the student protest at Jantar Mantar. A gap in authorising legislation is tolerable while a capability sits unused. It becomes a live issue the moment the capability is pointed at an identifiable group of people exercising a right.
The constitutional frame is the Supreme Court's privacy judgment, which requires that any intrusion by the state rest on a law, pursue a legitimate aim, and be proportionate to it. Live facial recognition at an assembly is difficult to fit into that test without a statute, because the technology by design captures everyone present rather than a named suspect.
The practical safeguard lawyers point to is deletion. Faces that do not match a database entry should be discarded immediately after the search rather than retained, since a retained non match is a record of attendance at a protest and nothing else. Building that rule into a parliamentary framework, rather than leaving it to procurement contracts and standard operating procedures, is what the legal experts quoted in the report are asking for.