Under the Thumb

A new legislation expands the government's surveillance powers / Law

- BINDU DODDAHATTI AND AMEYA BOKIL

By March 2021, the National Crime Records Bureau—the apex body maintaining crime- and criminal-related databases—had a record of eight million fingerprints in its National Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Much of it was collected, it is assumed, under the purview of either the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, or various state regulations. A lot of what has been collected, though, goes beyond the sanction of the law. For instance, there are the recent reports of police in Telangana and Madhya Pradesh collecting fingerprints and photographs during stop-and-search operations. It would seem that, so far, state desire for greater surveillance and the eagerness to adopt new technologies for this purpose has been checked only by the absence of physical infrastructure to store the quantities of data and not by any legal framework or procedural safeguards aimed at protecting citizens’ rights.

Over the last five years, the NCRB has moved to remove curtails by inviting private companies to help create the infrastructure for both the NAFIS and its National Automated Facial Recognition System. While the NAFIS is expected to store the fingerprints of 15 million people, the NAFRS proposal mentions storing 50 million facial images. Several states, including Telangana and Karnataka, are also in the process of shoring up their own data storage infrastructure through the creation of massive data centres. These developments have brought governments closer to solving the physical-capacity problem.