Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population. Mass surveillance in India includes Surveillance, Telephone tapping, Open-source intelligence, Lawful interception, and surveillance under Indian Telegraph Act, 1885.
In recent years, India has seen use of facial-recognition technology by the law enforcement. Telangana is the most surveilled state in India with 36 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people, while cities Delhi and Chennai have more cameras per square mile than cities in China.
History
Colonial India
Police surveillance
Police in colonial India developed surveillance tactics as a form of preventive policing believing that a substantial portion of crime was being committed by those who were or were suspected to be repeat offenders. Higher ranking police officials would go through criminal records to identify those who were to be surveilled by the constabulary, to this end history sheets or "bad character rolls" were maintained on such individuals. These surveillance practices also depended on local district superintendents and could be outside legislative sanction as they were allowed to develop their own policing practices by the Police Act of 1861. This reliance on surveillance was seen necessary owing to the police force being minimally staffed and relying on indirect power following the 1857 rebellion.
Indian Telegraph Act 1885
The section 5 of the Indian Telegraph Act allowed the Governor General or a Local Government to temporarily seize any licensed telegraph, and also gave them the ability block, intercept, detain, or even disclose the contents of any message transmitted during a "public emergency" or in "interest of public safety", the Secretary to the Government had a final say on whether something met those two criteria. This act is one of the principal laws allowing surveillance of electronic communication in modern India.
Use of Surveillance Technology
CCTV Cameras
Some Indian cities have some of the highest levels of CCTV surveillance in the world after those in China, with a Comparitech report in 2020 ranking Hyderabad among the top 20 most surveilled cities in the world, one of the only two non-Chinese cities in the list, with 29.99 CCTV cameras per 1000 people at that time. The number of CCTV cameras has only risen since then, with the most recent data available as of June 2023 putting Hyderabad (83.32 cameras/1000 people), Indore (60 cameras/1000 people), and Delhi (19.96 cameras/1000 people) among the world's most surveilled cities. However the number of CCTV cameras is not uniform among even major Indian cities, with just 4 cities; Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, and Indore accounting for 91% of CCTV cameras installed in the country.
Facial Recognition Technology
Police forces in India have been using Facial Recognition software to identify "history-sheeters", "miscreants", solve missing person cases, with the Delhi police even using it to identify protestors during the 2019 anti-CAA protests and in the farmer protest in the following year. Police forces like the Telangana police run facial recognition systems along with their extensive CCTV surveillance network to feed live data into facial recognition algorithms. In 2017, the Chennai Police installed a facial recognition system running on real time CCTV footage from areas of T Nagar, a popular shopping street in the city, to detect any criminals stored in their database, similar systems have been deployed by the Punjab Police as Punjab Artificial Intelligence System (PAIS), and by the Surat Police using NEC's NeoFace technology.