Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now locate anyone in seconds

Snigdha Sharma (0:00)

Your face caught on a camera, your vehicle number plate, voter ID, driving license, even a police clearance certificate. Any of these can now become a part of a vast web of data that the police can search in Delhi. And that matters especially now when the national capital is seeing mass protests and public demonstrations. And questions around surveillance, privacy and the right to dissent are becoming harder to ignore.

My colleague, The Ken reporter Pratap Vikram Singh, spent one month investigating one of the most ambitious surveillance systems being built in the national capital, the Delhi Police's 857 crore rupees Safe City Project. And hear this, it was conceived in the name of women's safety. That irony feels particularly stark now, as Delhi sees protests over, among other things, the lack of safety for women in the national capital. But the mandate of this project now extends far beyond that, to crime prevention, public order surveillance, and political and religious rallies. So what exactly has Delhi built? And what happens when a system designed to find criminals can almost also find anyone else?

That is the investigation that I am going to read out aloud to you today in Pratap's own words.

Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 6th of October.

If you want to go around Delhi and expect not to be pursued by prying eyes, good luck. If any of the mushrooming crop of cameras installed around the capital catches a glimpse of your face or vehicle number plate, law enforcement officials can identify you and track you down without breaking a sweat. Specially if you have a voter's ID, or a driver's license, or a vehicle registration certificate, or if you're a tenant, or a domestic worker, or if you or your employer has ever applied for or obtained a police clearance certificate, or a character certificate, or if you have been named in a court case anywhere in India. You have landed in the grid and there is no escaping it. Consider this. In April, a 37-year-old man driving a white Tata Sierra plowed through a security barricade at the entrance to Delhi's Legislative Assembly, sparking a security scare. He stepped out, placed what appeared to be a bouquet in the speaker's parked car and fled. The man was caught in less than two hours. The Sierra was stopped at a police picket barely four kilometers from the assembly and the driver detained. The police did not get lucky. They had help. The Safe City Project. That's a benign sounding name for an 857 crore rupee AI-based mass surveillance system that the Delhi police have been quietly putting in place over the last four years. It searches faces against a web of databases. Police clearance certificate, interoperable criminal justice system, electoral photo identity card, vahan, sarathi to identify a person of interest. It is a data lake of pictures, videos, and personal and biometric information of nearly four million individuals and counting. To access these, technology providers like NEC and Averos have built applications and search engines for the Delhi police.

While the Japan headquartered NEC is a system integrator, Gurgaon based Averos provides core applications like AI video analytics, facial recognition, and a reverse image search engine called Anvation. The Ken conducted a month long investigation, interviewing at least 20 police officers, service providers, and consultants, and reviewing official documents related to the Safe City Project to unravel the workings of one of the most pervasive surveillance systems deployed anywhere in the country.

The first phase of the federally funded project was rolled out in February, and the plan is to have it fully operational by the end of the year. At which point, at least one person at each of the city's 200-odd police stations will carry a smartphone with a facial recognition app. Could simply point the phone at a person of interest, click a picture and almost instantly pull up their details. And anyone could be a person of interest. The Safe City Project began in the name of women's safety. It grew out of a plan devised in the backdrop of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and paid for by the central government's Nirbhaya fund to help prevent heinous crimes by boosting the video surveillance capabilities of the police. The idea was to blanket the city with surveillance cameras and use AI to analyze the footage to identify women in distress and rush aid to them, or gather intelligence and evidence for the police investigations. The system would be fed by the voluminous criminal and citizen databases held by government agencies. The CDAC, which is the total service provider for this project under METI, said in its 2021 request for proposal.