India Planning To Set up World's Biggest Facial Recognition System: Reports

India is gearing up to set up on the biggest facial recognition system in the world. The government is planning to build a centralized database which can be accessed by police officials from all the states across the country. National Crime Records Bureau released documents which included 172-pages detailed report about the project. Companies can bid to build the facial recognition system.

Currently, it's an unnamed project, which would be capable of matching images from the CCTV camera network spread in the country with the mug shots of criminals. It will also match images from passports, agencies like the Ministry of Women and Child Development, and also from sketches of suspected criminals. It will gather all the images from all the sources to identify the criminals in all possible manner.

The system will be developed to recognize blacklisted matches and send an alert immediately when recognises faces on CCTV cameras. Moreover, it is also reported that the security forces will be equipped with mobile devices to capture faces to search instant from the national database with the help of a dedicated app. It seems that this database is going to play an essential role in identifying criminals and missing people. Let's see when we can witness this new system coming in.

IBM, HP Enterprise and Accenture are interested in taking part in the bid, Sivarama Krishnan, head of cybersecurity at PricewaterhouseCoopers India, told CNN. According to the report, the government is planning to complete this project within eight months after signing the contract with the company.

However, the concern is that India capital - New Delhi has only 10 CCTV cameras to monitor 1,000 people, compared to which Shanghai and London have 113 and 68 respectively. To achieve the big project India needs to improve the quantity of the CCTV cameras which can monitor the entire population.