IFF: Delhi: Saturday, 25 July 2026.
The Delhi Police is running live facial recognition on protesters at Jantar Mantar from a vendor-built surveillance van. By its own record, there is no rule, no retention policy and no privacy impact assessment.
Two Delhi Police vehicles
are stationed at the ongoing protests at Jantar Mantar: a Mobile Command and
Control Vehicle and a smaller van called 'Ikshana', inside which CCTV footage
of the protest is run through facial recognition software that draws green
boxes around faces and matches them against a police database. A senior officer
has confirmed to the press that live facial recognition is being run on
protesters. Another has admitted that no data retention guidelines are being
followed. The Delhi Police's own replies to our RTIs, extracted after a
second appeal before the Central Information Commission, establish that
there is no rule governing its use of facial recognition technology
("FRT"), that no privacy impact assessment was ever conducted, and
that a similarity score of just 80% is treated as a positive match. On July 24,
2026 we sent a legal representation to the Commissioner of Police, Delhi
seeking an immediate halt to live FRT at peaceful assemblies, deletion of the
biometric data of protesters, and publication of the rules, if any exist. We
have also filed four fresh RTI applications, including one directed at the
private vendor arrangement behind the Ikshana van.
The scene at Jantar Mantar
The Cockroach Janta Party ("CJP"), led by student activist Abhijeet Dipke, has been holding a sit-in and hunger strike at Jantar Mantar since 20 June 2026, protesting repeated examination paper leaks. As reported by the Indian Express on 23 July 2026, the two police vans stand parked outside Kerala House, at the heart of the protest. Inside the Ikshana van, officers watch screens where facial recognition software processes live CCTV feeds of the crowd, flagging faces for comparison against what one officer described as a large database of criminals. The Ikshana vehicle was inducted ahead of the G20 Summit in 2023 and carries eight fixed cameras giving 360-degree coverage.
The reporting records the human consequence with precision. Students are covering their faces. One protester preparing for competitive examinations feared that being filmed holding a poster would land her in a police database. Another worried the footage would find its way to his parents. A second senior officer conceded that no specific data retention guidelines were being adhered to, and that footage could remain on police systems indefinitely, available for investigations months later.
The vans have since become a story of their own. Videos circulating on social media appear to show the vehicles' screens displaying photographs and personal details of persons at the protest site. The Delhi Police has not disclosed which database these details are drawn from. Speculation that the system is linked to Aadhaar remains unverified, and that it can circulate at all is itself an indictment: seven years after we began asking, no one outside the police knows what these systems are matched against.
This surveillance is not incidental to the protest. It is a condition imposed on it. A petition, Aishe Ghosh v. Union of India, filed by the former JNU Students' Union president through advocates Subhash Chandran K.R. and Anirudh K.P., is pending before a Division Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia of the Delhi High Court. It alleges continuous, indiscriminate and intrusive surveillance of the assembly, including a permanent surveillance tower, blanket deployment of videographers, and monitoring so pervasive that it covers protesters eating and resting. The plea further alleges that police threatened student protesters that their photographs would be sent to their parents and educational institutions.
At the hearing on 20 July 2026, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Court that recording protests is routine and done only to maintain law and order: "There is no snooping. There is no surveillance." The green boxes inside the Ikshana van say otherwise. Notably, the Bench asked the Delhi Police to state whether any standard operating procedure or guidelines govern the handling of protests at all. That is precisely the question our RTI applications have put to the force, and we already know part of the answer from its own record.
What the paper trail already shows
We have been litigating transparency on the Delhi Police's use of FRT since 2020. Our original RTI applications were refused. Our first appeals were rejected. We won before the Central Information Commission in Second Appeal No. CIC/DEPOL/A/2021/604037, decided on 08.06.2022, and the disclosures that followed remain the only official record of how this system works. Our full 2022 analysis is here:
There is a further question the press reporting does not reach: who built this system, and what access do they retain? The answer sits on the vendor's own website. In a publication dated 12.04.2023, CP PLUS (Aditya Infotech Limited) announced that it designed and developed the prototype Ikshana vehicle in collaboration with the Delhi Police, complete with AI-powered cameras, face detection and recognition functions, and the vendor's own Health Monitoring System software integrated for live monitoring of the surveillance setup. The company added that the Delhi Police planned to commission more such vehicles.
No tender, contract, or data handling agreement for this arrangement has ever been disclosed. In 2022, the Delhi Police refused our request for tender documents citing national security, even as the vendor advertised the system's capabilities to the public. Whether a private company's software has remote access to a police surveillance system processing the biometric data of protesters is a question that deserves an answer on record. The pattern of private vendors embedded in Delhi's policing is one we flagged earlier this year in the context of the Safe City project.
Why this is illegal
The right to assemble peacefully at Jantar Mantar was affirmed by the Supreme Court in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India (2018). The right to privacy, and the three-fold requirement that any intrusion satisfy legality, legitimate aim and proportionality, was settled in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017). Live facial recognition of a lawful assembly fails at the first step: there is no law, and the police's own record admits there is not even a rule.
Indian law has never tolerated open-ended police surveillance. In Govind v. State of M.P. (1975) and Malak Singh v. State of Punjab and Haryana (1981), the Supreme Court confined surveillance to habitual and potential offenders, on recorded grounds, exercised discreetly. In Malak Singh, the Court warned:
"...nor can the surveillance be such as to squeeze the fundamental freedoms guaranteed to all citizens or to obstruct the free exercise and enjoyment of those freedoms; nor can the surveillance so intrude as to offend the dignity of the individual."
The practice at Jantar Mantar inverts every one of these conditions. Everyone present is scanned, not persons with recorded antecedents. There are no recorded grounds. The surveillance is conspicuous by design. It answers to no independent review. What five decades of precedent permitted as a narrow exception for history-sheeters has become the default condition of attending a protest.
The consequences were foreseen sixty-three years ago. In Kharak Singh v. State of U.P. (1963), Justice Subba Rao's dissent, since approved in Puttaswamy, held that a citizen under the shadow of surveillance cannot move, speak or associate freely. The covered faces at Jantar Mantar are the empirical proof of that holding. And when the state reaches for national security as a justification, the Supreme Court's Pegasus order in Manohar Lal Sharma v. Union of India (2021) is the answer: its mere invocation does not oust constitutional scrutiny.
What we have done
On July 24, 2026 we sent a legal representation to the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, requesting that his office:
Transparency litigation of this kind is slow, unglamorous and entirely dependent on our members. If you believe that attending a protest should not place your face in a police database, become an IFF member and help us see this through.
Important Documents
The Delhi Police is running live facial recognition on protesters at Jantar Mantar from a vendor-built surveillance van. By its own record, there is no rule, no retention policy and no privacy impact assessment.
The scene at Jantar Mantar
The Cockroach Janta Party ("CJP"), led by student activist Abhijeet Dipke, has been holding a sit-in and hunger strike at Jantar Mantar since 20 June 2026, protesting repeated examination paper leaks. As reported by the Indian Express on 23 July 2026, the two police vans stand parked outside Kerala House, at the heart of the protest. Inside the Ikshana van, officers watch screens where facial recognition software processes live CCTV feeds of the crowd, flagging faces for comparison against what one officer described as a large database of criminals. The Ikshana vehicle was inducted ahead of the G20 Summit in 2023 and carries eight fixed cameras giving 360-degree coverage.
The reporting records the human consequence with precision. Students are covering their faces. One protester preparing for competitive examinations feared that being filmed holding a poster would land her in a police database. Another worried the footage would find its way to his parents. A second senior officer conceded that no specific data retention guidelines were being adhered to, and that footage could remain on police systems indefinitely, available for investigations months later.
The vans have since become a story of their own. Videos circulating on social media appear to show the vehicles' screens displaying photographs and personal details of persons at the protest site. The Delhi Police has not disclosed which database these details are drawn from. Speculation that the system is linked to Aadhaar remains unverified, and that it can circulate at all is itself an indictment: seven years after we began asking, no one outside the police knows what these systems are matched against.
This surveillance is not incidental to the protest. It is a condition imposed on it. A petition, Aishe Ghosh v. Union of India, filed by the former JNU Students' Union president through advocates Subhash Chandran K.R. and Anirudh K.P., is pending before a Division Bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia of the Delhi High Court. It alleges continuous, indiscriminate and intrusive surveillance of the assembly, including a permanent surveillance tower, blanket deployment of videographers, and monitoring so pervasive that it covers protesters eating and resting. The plea further alleges that police threatened student protesters that their photographs would be sent to their parents and educational institutions.
At the hearing on 20 July 2026, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Court that recording protests is routine and done only to maintain law and order: "There is no snooping. There is no surveillance." The green boxes inside the Ikshana van say otherwise. Notably, the Bench asked the Delhi Police to state whether any standard operating procedure or guidelines govern the handling of protests at all. That is precisely the question our RTI applications have put to the force, and we already know part of the answer from its own record.
What the paper trail already shows
We have been litigating transparency on the Delhi Police's use of FRT since 2020. Our original RTI applications were refused. Our first appeals were rejected. We won before the Central Information Commission in Second Appeal No. CIC/DEPOL/A/2021/604037, decided on 08.06.2022, and the disclosures that followed remain the only official record of how this system works. Our full 2022 analysis is here:
- There is no rule. The CCTV Cell of New Delhi District stated in writing on 03.02.2022 that there is no specific rule for the use of facial recognition technology in the Delhi Police.
- 80% is a "positive" match. The reply dated 25.07.2022 disclosed that a similarity score of 80% and above is treated as a positive result. When the American Civil Liberties Union ran Amazon's Rekognition tool at its default confidence threshold in 2018, it falsely matched 28 members of the US Congress to criminal mugshots, disproportionately legislators of colour. Applied to a crowd, this arithmetic manufactures suspects.
- No privacy impact assessment was ever done. The Delhi Police admitted as much, while assuring us that the privacy of every citizen is sacrosanct.
- The databases rest on a repealed statute. The matching databases were stated to be maintained under Sections 3 and 4 of the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, a law that Parliament repealed in 2022. What legal basis they rest on today is unknown. Reporting from as far back as 2019 indicated that the Delhi Police's datasets extended well beyond history-sheeters, to images harvested from footage of the city's protests.
- Function creep is complete. The Delhi High Court in Sadhan Haldar v. NCT of Delhi permitted the Delhi Police to obtain FRT to trace missing children. It has since been used on the 2020 North East Delhi riots, the Red Fort violence, Jahangirpuri, and now on students holding posters.
There is a further question the press reporting does not reach: who built this system, and what access do they retain? The answer sits on the vendor's own website. In a publication dated 12.04.2023, CP PLUS (Aditya Infotech Limited) announced that it designed and developed the prototype Ikshana vehicle in collaboration with the Delhi Police, complete with AI-powered cameras, face detection and recognition functions, and the vendor's own Health Monitoring System software integrated for live monitoring of the surveillance setup. The company added that the Delhi Police planned to commission more such vehicles.
No tender, contract, or data handling agreement for this arrangement has ever been disclosed. In 2022, the Delhi Police refused our request for tender documents citing national security, even as the vendor advertised the system's capabilities to the public. Whether a private company's software has remote access to a police surveillance system processing the biometric data of protesters is a question that deserves an answer on record. The pattern of private vendors embedded in Delhi's policing is one we flagged earlier this year in the context of the Safe City project.
Why this is illegal
The right to assemble peacefully at Jantar Mantar was affirmed by the Supreme Court in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India (2018). The right to privacy, and the three-fold requirement that any intrusion satisfy legality, legitimate aim and proportionality, was settled in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017). Live facial recognition of a lawful assembly fails at the first step: there is no law, and the police's own record admits there is not even a rule.
Indian law has never tolerated open-ended police surveillance. In Govind v. State of M.P. (1975) and Malak Singh v. State of Punjab and Haryana (1981), the Supreme Court confined surveillance to habitual and potential offenders, on recorded grounds, exercised discreetly. In Malak Singh, the Court warned:
"...nor can the surveillance be such as to squeeze the fundamental freedoms guaranteed to all citizens or to obstruct the free exercise and enjoyment of those freedoms; nor can the surveillance so intrude as to offend the dignity of the individual."
The practice at Jantar Mantar inverts every one of these conditions. Everyone present is scanned, not persons with recorded antecedents. There are no recorded grounds. The surveillance is conspicuous by design. It answers to no independent review. What five decades of precedent permitted as a narrow exception for history-sheeters has become the default condition of attending a protest.
The consequences were foreseen sixty-three years ago. In Kharak Singh v. State of U.P. (1963), Justice Subba Rao's dissent, since approved in Puttaswamy, held that a citizen under the shadow of surveillance cannot move, speak or associate freely. The covered faces at Jantar Mantar are the empirical proof of that holding. And when the state reaches for national security as a justification, the Supreme Court's Pegasus order in Manohar Lal Sharma v. Union of India (2021) is the answer: its mere invocation does not oust constitutional scrutiny.
What we have done
On July 24, 2026 we sent a legal representation to the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, requesting that his office:
- Immediately cease live facial recognition of participants in peaceful assemblies at Jantar Mantar and other protest sites, absent specific legal authorisation.
- Confine videography of assemblies to the position stated before the Delhi High Court, and discontinue continuous and indiscriminate recording.
- Delete footage, facial templates and match results of protesters not connected to the investigation of a specific cognisable offence.
- Publish the SOPs governing FRT, CCTV, surveillance vehicles, drones and videography of assemblies, including retention and destruction schedules.
- Commission and publish a data protection impact assessment before any further FRT deployment.
- Disclose the vendor arrangements behind the Ikshana vehicles and confirm on record that no private entity has access to the data.
- Constitute a consultation with civil society and technical experts.
- With PIO: Crime, on the FRT and AI analytics systems: the SOPs, the current match threshold, accuracy audits, the databases and their legal basis after the 1920 Act's repeal, retention, and compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
- With New Delhi District, on the CCTV network and videography at Jantar Mantar: camera numbers, deployment orders for the vans and videography teams, the alleged surveillance tower, retention, and the instructions in force when the Solicitor General made his statement.
- With Police Headquarters, on drones: fleet, procurement, SOPs, Digital Sky registration, deployment at Jantar Mantar, and whether drone footage feeds facial recognition.
- With Police Headquarters, on Project Ikshana: every contract with the private vendor, the cost of each vehicle, whether procurement followed open tender under the General Financial Rules, whether vendor software transmits data to private servers, and whether any private entity can access footage or biometric data.
Transparency litigation of this kind is slow, unglamorous and entirely dependent on our members. If you believe that attending a protest should not place your face in a police database, become an IFF member and help us see this through.
Important Documents
- IFF's legal representation to the Commissioner of Police, Delhi dated [24.07.2026] [Link]
- RTI application on FRT and AI video analytics filed with PIO: Crime [Link]
- RTI application on CCTV and videography filed with New Delhi District [Link]
- RTI application on drones filed with Police Headquarters [Link]
- RTI application on Project Ikshana and vendor involvement filed with Police Headquarters [Link]
- Delhi Police reply dated 25.07.2022 pursuant to the CIC's decision in Second Appeal No. CIC/DEPOL/A/2021/604037 [Link]
- CCTV Cell report dated 03.02.2022 stating that no rule governs FRT use [Link]
- CP PLUS publication dated 12.04.2023 on the Ikshana prototype [Link] (archived copy: [[Link]])
- The Indian Express report dated 24.07.2026 [[Link]]
- Bar and Bench report of the Delhi High Court hearing dated 20.07.2026 in Aishe Ghosh v. Union of India [Link]
- Our 2022 analysis: "Delhi Police's claims that FRT is accurate at 80% are 100% scary" [Link]
- Our February 2026 analysis of Delhi's Safe City project [Link]
.JPG)
.JPG)
