Face recognition system launch draws near
Beneficiaries will be the Home Affairs ministry, Crime Records Bureau and state police forces
With the tender submission date to procure the National Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) just 20 days away, India is closer to installing world’s largest facial recognition system to track and nab criminals.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), under the Home Ministry, invited bids on July 8, which will be closed on November 8. The winner of the contract to provide AFRS will be announced on November 8.
“This is an effort in the direction of modernising the police force,” said the NCRB in its 172-page document.
The beneficiaries will be Ministry of Home Affairs, NCRB and state police forces.
List of criminals
The benefits will be “a robust system for identifying criminals, missing children/persons, unidentified dead bodies and unknown traced children/ persons all over the country; a repository of photographs of criminals in the country; enhanced ability to detect crime patterns and modus operandi across the states and communicate to the state police departments for aiding in crime prevention”.
With the help of the software, the state police personnel can check the suspect with the hotlist of criminals.
In April last year, Delhi Police identified almost 3,000 missing children in just four days during a trial of a facial recognition system. However, there are concerns that the technology can be misused. According to Pavan Duggal, one of the nation’s top cyber law experts, the Information Technology Act, 2000 does not specially deal with misuse of this technology.
“The first casualty of the absence of regulatory framework for facial recognition technology is people’s right to privacy,” Duggal told journalists recently.
“In India, there is not even any framework to regulate the storage of facial recognition data,” he added.
The benefits will be “a robust system for identifying criminals, missing children/ persons, unidentified dead bodies and unknown traced children/persons all over the country; a repository of photographs of criminals in the country”, the NCRB said in its tender document.