India opens bids on $4M contract for facial recognition and security cameras in prisons

The Public Works Department of Delhi, India, has launched a tender for 1,248 CCTV cameras, some with facial recognition, to be installed across the Tihar, Mandoli and Rohini prison complexes for an estimated cost of roughly 352 million rupees (approximately US$4.2 million).

The department will add CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology to existing surveillance systems with Bosch hardware in the city’s three prisons to increase security.

“This is the first time that we will be installing facial recognition cameras,” Sandeep Goel, director general of the Tihar prison, tells the Times of India, adding that the complex will add 556 regular CCTV cameras and 160 with facial recognition.

From a technical standpoint, integrating biometric software will enable existing surveillance systems to work with facial recognition on both real-time and recorded data.

“The Facial Recognition System (FRS) targeted by this specification must be able to identify multiple persons of interest in real-time or recorded video files through leading-edge face recognition technology from different video sources like IP cameras, body-worn cameras, and mobile handset cameras, etc,” reads the tender.

“The solution shall be able to perform in a crowd, on the move, and at a distance, with enrolment on the fly.”

A pre-bid meeting will be held on October 28, but bidding is already open, and closes November 5.

The software will be installed at three remote locations with independent databases and processing servers and will offer blacklisting and whitelisting options for generating customized alerts.

“Inmates are not allowed to go to other wards. In case they try, their movement will be captured, and we will be alerted,” a Tihar officer told the Times of India.

According to the tender, the time allowed for carrying out the work will be six months from the date of acceptance.

For more information about the technical specifications, supply, installation and testing of the upcoming biometric CCTV systems, the full text of the tender is publicly available on the Tenders Delhi website. It can be found by typing “14/CE(OP)/PWD/2022-23” in the search bar.

The tender comes months after an ombudsman in Pakistan called for a common interface for prisons management information systems, which included inmates’ finger biometrics.

More recently, Australia moved forward in deploying biometric technologies in the state’s prisons, entering a $12.8 million contract with American IT firm Unisys, with support from Tascent.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  cctv  |  edge cameras  |  facial recognition  |  India  |  prisons  |  tender  |  video surveillance