J&K Police Confirms Use of Face Recognition Tech in Detention of Carpenter at Pahalgam

Srinagar: Authorities have detained a carpenter who is listed in police records as an overground worker of militants (OGW) after he was flagged by a facial recognition system near Pahalgam where 26 civilians, mostly tourists, were gunned down in a terror attack in April this year.

This is the first time that J&K police have officially confirmed that it was using the controversial technology which was long rumoured to have helped the security agencies in profiling Kashmiri militants and their suspected sympathisers for counter-intelligence operations.

A J&K police official said on Thursday (June 20) that the suspect who hails from Seer Hamdan village of south Kashmir’s Anantnag district was apprehended after being flagged by the facial recognition system at the Langanbal security checkpoint near Nunwan base camp in Pahalgam ahead of the commencement of the pilgrimage to the Amarnath cave shrine.

Amarnath Yatra

Nunwan base camp is one of the two starting points for the annual Hindu pilgrimage which will begin from July 3 under the shadow of the Pahalgam terrorist attack and culminate on August 9. “The individual is in custody; investigation underway. Safety of #AmarnathYatra2025 remains our top priority,” the official said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Sources said that the system has been pre-fed with the database of all the suspected OGWs of Kashmir and it has been deployed near at least two checkpoints along the road to Pahalgam. A suspected OGW, who spoke with The Wire, said that he was recently asked to furnish his Aadhaar details at his concerned police station.

It was not immediately clear whether the system works by recognising a suspect’s facial features or their biometrics. A similar system is also being installed on the second and shortest route to the Himalayan cave shrine which commences from Baltal area of central Kashmir’s Sonmarg health resort.

The J&K Police have kept a database of hundreds of OGWs who have been named or formally charged in militancy-related First Information Reports (FIR) in Kashmir. These Kashmiri suspects are often summoned to police stations and detained on important national holidays such as Republic Day and Independence Day, or whenever the prime minister or union home minister are visiting the Valley.

Although most of the suspects named in the FIRs have been granted bail by the courts, police has kept them on its watch list amid apprehensions of their continuing involvement in militancy. The controversial system would effectively make them criminals in the eyes of law and liable for detention or arrest without any sound legal backing.

“No one with an FIR or with an adverse police record can walk or travel on Khanabal-Pahalgam road particularly beyond Mattan (in Anantnag district) till the time the yatra is over,” sources said.

A controversial technology

The use of facial recognition surveillance in law enforcement has been a source of  raging debate across the world with human rights groups and legal experts seeking a complete ban on its use in public places over the fears of privacy violation and human rights concerns.

According to a 2024 Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) analysis, India has about 170 facial recognition systems with a collective expenditure of around Rs 15.13 billion of which Rs 7.7 billion have been spent by the central government and Rs 7.43 billion by the state governments.

However, only 20 of these systems are reportedly operational in Delhi, Maharashtra and Telangana, the IFF analysis states, adding that the police, army and other security agencies made more use of the technology than any other government departments.

In 2018, police told the Delhi high court that the software used by the facial recognition system in the national capital was accurate only 2% of the time and “not good”.

The National Crime Records Bureau is developing the National Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) to use facial recognition technology for assisting law enforcement agencies in crime investigations by identifying criminals from a bank of photographs and videos.

The Supreme Court has ruled that any intrusion by the State into people's right to privacy, which is protected as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution, must conform to the thresholds of legality, necessity, proportionality and procedural safeguards.

However, the IFF has said that the AFRS proposal fails to meet any of these thresholds, citing manifest arbitrariness and the absence of legality, accountability and other safeguards. Legal experts have also said that there was no law in place to keep track of how this technology was being used.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International among 180 global defenders of human rights have called on the governments across the world to stop using facial recognition surveillance technology in public spaces, terming it as a tool of “mass surveillance” as concerns prevail over the use and storage of data gathered by the systems.

“The use of facial recognition by the police and security/intelligence agencies will not only lead to violation of the rights to privacy and freedom of speech and expression but also lead to human rights violations by helping to increase systemic bias against already marginalised communities,” Amnesty has said in a letter to the prime minister Narendra Modi.

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