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India’s race to adopt AI sparks a deeper question: How can technology respect human rights?

April 23, 2026

India currently operates under a loose AI governance framework consisting of voluntary guidelines, an unenacted ethics bill, and data protection rules that allow AI deployment without mandatory transparency or pre-deployment assessments. The government has rapidly expanded AI-enabled surveillance systems across the country, including facial recognition technology at airports, railway stations, exam halls, and public welfare programs, often without adequate legal safeguards or accountability mechanisms. These technologies have disproportionately harmed marginalized communities, with facial recognition systems failing to identify pregnant women, elderly individuals, and people with darker skin tones, thereby denying them access to essential services like food distribution programs.

Who is affected

  • Pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children (approximately 47 million people) enrolled in India's Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme who were denied food assistance due to facial recognition failures
  • Railway passengers and air travelers forced to use facial recognition systems like DigiYatra at airports
  • Students in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Karnataka subjected to AI-enabled CCTV surveillance during exams
  • Protesters and individuals flagged in police databases as "suspected individuals" or "troublemakers"
  • Marginalized communities and people with darker skin tones who experience higher error rates with facial recognition technology
  • Civil society organizations and human rights groups including Amnesty International, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), and SFLC.in
  • Big Tech platforms required to remove AI-generated deepfakes
  • Delhi residents monitored by over 4,000 AI-enabled cameras during the AI Impact Summit

What action is being taken

  • The Internet Freedom Foundation is maintaining Project Panoptic, a comprehensive public database tracking more than 120 government facial recognition contracts across India
  • Delhi Police are operating 32 control rooms coordinating AI-driven surveillance networks with facial recognition systems, real-time video analytics, and AI-enabled smart glasses
  • The Indian government is requiring intermediaries and social media platforms to swiftly remove AI-generated deepfakes
  • The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is implementing the IndiaAI Mission with 13 projects focused on bias mitigation, ethical AI frameworks, privacy-enhancing tools, explainable AI, and deepfake detection
  • Facial recognition technology is being deployed in the Poshan Tracker government app for the ICDS food distribution programme
  • AI-enabled CCTV surveillance is being installed in exam halls across multiple Indian states

Why it matters

  • This situation matters because India is creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure that operates without adequate legal protections, transparency, or accountability mechanisms, threatening fundamental human rights including privacy, dignity, and civil liberties. The "deploy first, question later" approach particularly harms India's most vulnerable populations—the poor, marginalized communities, and people with darker skin tones—who face discrimination through biased AI systems that fail to recognize them, denying access to essential services like food assistance. The expansion of state surveillance capabilities without binding legal frameworks or effective remedies creates conditions for potential digital authoritarianism, where citizens can be monitored, tracked, and controlled without recourse. The disconnect between India's aspirational "responsible AI" rhetoric and the reality of unregulated, rights-violating AI deployment undermines trust in both government institutions and AI technology itself, while setting a concerning precedent for AI governance in other developing nations.

What's next

  • The Artificial Intelligence (Ethics and Accountability) Bill, 2025, which proposes establishing an Ethics Committee, mandatory ethical reviews, bias audits, restrictions on surveillance uses, and grievance mechanisms, has not yet been enacted
  • Human rights activists are calling for India to enact specific legislation for AI-enabled surveillance with mandatory transparency and oversight of surveillance systems
  • Some observers have suggested developing a SAARC-wide regulatory framework based on the EU AI Act, though this remains merely a policy recommendation rather than a proposed legally binding law

Read full article from source: Global Voices