India is rapidly digitising. There are good things and bad, speed-bumps on the way and caveats to be mindful of. The weekly column Terminal focuses on all that is connected and is not – on digital issues, policy, ideas and themes dominating the conversation in India and the world.
India’s DigiYatra, a facial recognition based authentication system is continuously being forced on air passengers. This is not a shocking development with India’s policy to increase surveillance post 26/11 Mumbai attacks. These biometric technologies like fingerprint recognition and facial recognition with Aadhaar seem to be inspired from the US deployments after 9/11. Yet, the supplier of these biometric technologies to India is actually a geo-political partner in the east that is helping us build systems like Aadhaar, DigiYatra – Japan.
Japan’s NEC (Nippon Electric Company) Corporation has been supplying biometric technologies to UIDAI, Airport Authority, Smart Cities Mission and various Indian police departments for the past decade. NEC is a global giant when it comes to biometric technologies, consistently outperforming in the US National Institute of Standards and Technology evaluations for facial, iris and fingerprint recognition.
NEC has supplied its solutions for biometric identification to UIDAI to help with the de-duplication and identification process. “For the Aadhaar Program, NEC has specially adjusted its identification algorithms to enhance the identification accuracy of its biometric system even further,” said a marketing announcement from the firm. The push to use biometrics for travel identification is an old proposal with UIDAI and Indian Railways even conducting experiments for Aadhaar verification inside moving trains.
Also read: How ‘Digi Yatra’ Can Potentially Be Used to Police Your Travel
Now NEC is helping build the Digi Yatra Ecosystem by supplying facial recognition solutions to four airports in Varanasi, Kolkata, Pune and Vijayawada controlled by the Airports Authority of India. NEC supplies kiosk terminals, biometric e-gates and will operate them for seven years. The vendors which are supplying these facial recognition kiosks vary from airport to airport. In case of GMR controlled airports of Delhi and Hyderabad, the facial recognition technologies are being supplied by IDEMIA.
Each airport owner decides to use a different contractor that can supply the facial recognition kiosks. It is these kiosks that are primarily carrying out facial recognition at airports to allow passengers to self check-in at security gates. While the Digi Yatra mobile application is the point of user verification and collection of facial biometrics, the actual authentication at airports happens with algorithms that are supplied by contractors like NEC or IDEMIA.
Biometrics in India are now ubiquitous in day to day life from unlocking phones to using them everywhere Aadhaar has been forcefully made mandatory. But the real danger of these technologies is in policing and surveillance of India’s population. The UIDAI has now blocked biometrics of close to 19 lakh people in Assam, whose fate is in a limbo with India’s population laws and citizenship exercises.
NEC has been supplying fingerprint and facial recognition cameras to different police departments in India. NEC’s vast experience in this space gives it an edge compared to other domestic and international organisations operating in India. NEC was believed to be the top contender in India’s National Facial Recognition System tender process, which Indian firms have accused to have been designed to favour foreign organisations leading to its revistion.
It should not come as a surprise that the technology used to build Aadhaar and DigiYatra is being supplied by the same company that also provides technology to India’s policing agencies for surveillance and control. The application of a variety of systems engineering in transportation led to the creation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), which are widely used for applications like GPS tracking, toll management, route planning, and ticketing.
DigiYatra is technically an Intelligent Transportation System that has been evolved to Indian conditions by using facial recognition kiosks that are globally used in airports for check-ins. Except in India, it has been taken over by private actors, who claim they are the only people who know how to design “systems” and the Indian government gains control over citizens in the process. It is these intelligent systems in different sectors that are being branded as “Digital Public Infrastructures” to be further exported to other countries.
It is through international co-operations between India and Japan on a host of sectors that these technologies arrived in India including in transportation and were later used in policing. With support of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for the Outer Ring Road project in Hyderabad, CCTVs became extensively part of the city with Intelligent Transportation Systems being part of the development plan in 2009. JICA later provided special assistance to Hyderabad with large scale deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems including Automatic Number Plate Recognition Cameras in 2014. This helped Hyderabad police manage vehicular challans and also help with surveillance of its streets post the Dilsukhnagar blasts in 2013.
The Indo-Japan cooperation is very strategic to India’s economic and security interests. India and Japan have historically co-operated in trade, tourism, defence and security. This has increased over the past few decades with Japanese support in India’s smart cities and 5G expansion. At the heart of these co-operations are firms like NEC Corporation which provide extensive support to India’s economic and security ambitions. NEC, which started building computers with NEAC-1103, has been providing India with technologies it needed since the 1950s.
The Indo-Japan cooperation in technology is also important in context of India’s geo-political challenges with China. India does not want to source any critical infrastructure, from CCTVs to biometric sensors, from China. Japan provides us an alternative which is considered a win-win geo-politically and economically. In terms of technology transfer to security of digital technologies, these geo-political arrangements play a critical role in how technology is deployed and used. There is a lot of interest within Japan now to build similar infrastructures like Aadhaar.
These technologies, as they provide control to whoever deploys them, have potential for human rights violations and their history of forceful implementation in India is just the tip of the tragedy. While NEC Corporation itself has a human rights policy, Indian organisations, including the private sector, are known for their abuse of such systems. The lack of risk assessments, laws and the bad faith deployment of these technologies by forcing them on people with complete dis-regard for India’s fundamental right to privacy, shows how well our institutions respect rights.
One should not wonder if systems like DigiYatra will eventually be used to restrict travel of political leaders, journalists, human rights activists and other vulnerable groups. The likelihood of all of this experimentation of facial recognition across airports being used to train India’s National Facial Recognition System is very high.
Srinivas Kodali worked at Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory, IIT Madras as a student between 2012-13.
