India govt blocks plans to procure facial recognition, drones to monitor election

A request by the government of India’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) to acquire surveillance technology including drones and biometrics for election security has been blocked by the Election Commission, Times of India reports.

The NIC was officially looking for partners in election surveillance. Medianama reports that a tender issued in December seeks a vendor for “procurement and deployment of surveillance equipment including drones and facial recognition systems for monitoring election processes during state and central elections.” The proposed tender also includes plans for a live webcast of the vote and the establishment of a command and control center for centralized surveillance by election officials.

“Election Commission (ECI) desires that webcasting should be done from as many Polling Stations and Counting halls as possible,” reads the tender. “Minimum 5 percent to 10 percent of the polling stations to be selected for live webcasting.”

Unsurprisingly, the plan was deeply unpopular with privacy rights advocates, who called foul on the NIC’s stated intention to “prevent unfair practices and maintain law and order at polling stations during elections”. In a post on the Internet Freedom Foundation’s (IFF) website, author Disha Verma argues that “the proposed use of monitoring and surveillance technologies is antithetical to a free and fair election.”

“The IFF wrote to the NIC and ECI outlining the various harms of election surveillance, including voter intimidation, overbroad surveillance and profiling, exclusion errors with facial recognition, and privacy concerns,” says the IFF article. Among the proposals it objects to are the installation of field surveillance vehicles, drones, facial recognition systems, IP-based cameras, and web-based audio and video streaming software in polling stations and counting halls.

The ECI responded that the tender had been floated without its approval, prompting the NIC to cancel it.

The government body had certain requirements for a provider to facilitate the surveillance infrastructure. They included the ability to deploy flying squad vehicle and drone surveillance teams for cloud-based central monitoring, for which “the video streaming solution should be able to display multiple streams happening at the same time during the electoral process.”

For facial recognition, the NIC said it requires AI-enabled FRT “with an application installed on a camera for verification of the voters.” The NIC also proposed the use of AI in the vote reading and tallying process. “Additionally,” says Medianama, prior to the cancellation, “an AI-enabled video analytics software will also be implemented which will be capable of providing head count of voters’ queue, EVM monitoring and malpractice alert, and optical character recognition (OCR) or text recognition capabilities.”

Other requirements included “secured, proven web-based software,” live streaming of the polling and counting process, and conformance with government cloud storage regulations.

The IFF had urged the NIC and ECI to evaluate the plan and to conduct a full privacy-impact assessment.

Article Topics

drones  |  elections  |  facial recognition  |  India  |  monitoring  |  tender  |  video surveillance