The surveillance technology in India is on its peak points. As per the Industry experts, the buzz is because of growing demand from law enforcement and intelligence organization despite legal privacy concerns.
Even, Government finds this technology useful as it helped them to find out the criminals, missing people and in the identification of dead bodies. Some of the Indian states are using the technology for data mining on social media to check if someone is harming the government protocols.
The key players of Industry are Videonetics, Innefu Labs, FaceTags, StaqU from India and Verint systems and Japan’s NEC from the United States.
Tinku Acharya, MS from Videonetics, commented that most of the surveillance demand is from government bodies. Thus, they are the highest revenue sources as well. Acharya added that their services had covered 136 cities of India including central, state, law enforcement bodies, etc. Videonetics is backed by GenNext ventures and expecting around 50-60% growth in 2020.
As per the research report by KDMarketInsights- India’s surveillance industry will grow six times by the end of 2024. It will be nearly equal to China.
The industry giants are coming up with an idea to centralize the facial recognition technology across the country. It means that a person’s fingerprint to passports, everything will be connected. It will help the NCRB’s plan in criminal identification and record analysis.
No doubt, the demand for surveillance is on the boom. Vijay Gnanadesikan, CEO at Facetag, said that earlier police departments only from innovative cities used to demand surveillance systems. However, other cities are also following the trend.
Tarun Wig, the cofounder at Innefu Labs, added that technology is treated as an extension of intelligence arm because various law enforcement agencies are using the system to trap criminals forces. The technology recently has shown its power during the protest of citizenship law in Delhi. Armed force is extended to Jammu & Kashmir and Maharashtra Police as well. According to Wig, Initially, Police were quite doubtful about the use of this modern technology. However, their doubts got resolved now as security is an equally important part of our basic living.
On the other hand, many private activists feel that in the absence of any privacy law, there would be high chances of data misuse and malfunctions. It could also harm the weaker and below poverty line community.
Shivangi Narayan, a JNU student, has done a lot of research on artificial technology and says that this would be harmful for the nation. She further adds that her research findings say that Police are biased towards the poor section of the country.