tl;drTender documents reviewed by IFF show that on July 30, 2026, Delhi Police invited bids worth Rs 15.66 crore for 338 CCTV cameras across Central and New Delhi districts, described as cover for “VIP/VVIP route” on Republic Day and Independence Day. The site list places cameras at the VVIP gate of Ramlila Maidan, Turkman Gate, Delhi Gate, Rajghat, the India Gate hexagon, Mandi House and Patiala House. The specifications require face recognition on every fixed and PTZ camera, “people gathering” detection and built-in microphones, designed to integrate with the Safe City camera network. Bids closed on 20 August, 2026. On 11 October, 2026, the Commissioner of Police de-notified Jantar Mantar and named Ramlila Maidan as a designated protest site and the award for this contract may be signed any day.BackgroundThe Delhi Police’s Provisioning & Logistics unit placed a bid bearing the registration code GEM/2026/B/7850422 on the Government e-Marketplace on 30 July 2026, which closed on 20 August. The request for proposal, 76 pages, is still titled “DRAFT RFP 338 CCTV Final”. It seeks to procure 248 fixed cameras, 43 pan-tilt-zoom cameras and 47 automatic number-plate readers, with 30 days of storage, video-management software, ANPR software and a “License of Face Recognition in 10 percent of total quantity of Fixed and PTZ camera”. The winning bidder runs the system for five years.This does not seem to be financially allocated from the rupee Rs 800 crore Safe City project but is a district-level purchase, from the same unit that, per an RTI reply reported by The Wire in 2025, had already installed 6,630 cameras across 50 police-station areas with face recognition on about one in ten. The same template was used for a 194-camera bid in North District in May 2026 and the pattern is spreading, district by district.The timing is worth a note. The Cockroach Janta Party’s Jantar Mantar protests over the NEET paper leak ran from 6 June 2026 until 25 July, when they were called off after the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Five days later, on 30 July, Delhi Police placed this bid for 338 cameras along the arteries that connect Jantar Mantar, Parliament, Ramlila Maidan and the India Gate hexagon. We do not know whether one followed the other.It comes at a time Delhi Police has told the Supreme Court that it ran facial recognition on the Jantar Mantar crowds in July 2026 and produced 2,873 “matches”, a list that reporting from the Indian Express has shown to be unreliable and unlawful. The Ministry of Home Affairs has told Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale that this runs under a Standing Order which the Ministry did not make public, and which we published on 2 October, however it never mentions facial recognition. The Supreme Court has a committee under Justice R. Subhash Reddy looking at wider questions of legality which include the surveillance of protesters. Subsequently on 11 October the Commissioner of Police, Anurag Kumar, issued Standing Order L&O/48/2026, which cites a Home Ministry committee and partially modifies the April 2022 Standing Order IFF had published nine days earlier. The Order de-notified Jantar Mantar and designated Ramlila Maidan, Burari Ground and CBD Ground Shahdara in its place. A “detailed and revised SOP” for the three venues, it says, will be issued separately.Also read: Special | As AI Took Over Policing in Delhi, Who Bore the Brunt?AnalysisWhere the cameras will be installed Chapter 3A of the RFP lists over 100 sites with GPS coordinates. In Central District (188 cameras, control rooms at the I.P. Estate and Darya Ganj police stations) the list runs down Mahatma Gandhi Marg from the ITO flyover past Rajghat, Shanti Van and the Salimgarh flyover below the Red Fort, then into the old Delhi areas including Ghata Masjid, Gandhi Market, Gurunanak Chowk, Turkman Gate, Asaf Ali Road and Delhi Gate. Sites 59 and 60 are, “VVIP Gate Ramleela Ground” and “Footpath Chaman Lal Marg in front of VIP gate of Ram Lila Ground”. The In and Out gates of Police Headquarters at ITO are on the list.In New Delhi District (150 cameras, control rooms at Tilak Marg and Tughlak Road), the list covers every arm of the India Gate C-Hexagon, the Firozshah Road–Kasturba Gandhi Marg cut and W-Point on the Mandi House side, Bhagwan Das Road, the Patiala House courts, Pragati Maidan, Bhairon Marg and the Lodhi Road–Zakir Hussain Marg corridor. Out of the three new protest sites two namely, Burari and Shahdara which are 23 km and 12 km away are outside this tender while Ramlila Maidan which is 3 km from Jantar Mantar, and multiple approaches to it, including Delhi Gate, Turkman Gate and Asaf Ali Road, are on the list. We have no evidence that the two decisions were coordinated. We can say that the ground the police have chosen for protests is ground they had already chosen to watch with facial recognition.What the cameras are specified to doThe fixed camera (Chapter 4, item 1, row 14) must carry the analytics for, “Intrusion, Tripwire, People counting/people gathering, face recognition, Tamper detection”. The PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom camera) camera (item 2, row 28) must support “Face Recognition”. Even the number-plate camera (item 3, row 31) must do “Face Detection”. The video-management software (item 17, row 51), “should support Face Recognition System. FRS should become part of VMS with perpetual license.”Clause 1.7(f), repeated at Clause 12.2(viii), says cameras are “to be strategically placed at suitable height with structure arrangement, so as to identify and capture the face of a particular person roaming around at Critical/vulnerable points”. “People counting/people gathering” is mandatory on every fixed camera. Further, at Delhi, “People counting/people gathering” is mandatory on the fixed cameras, and at Delhi Gate and Ramlila Maidan, people gathering is the point. Every camera type has a microphone. The fixed camera has a, “Built-in mic, 1 IN/1 Out” (item 1, row 20); the PTZ and ANPR cameras have audio in and out, and the VMS (item 17, row 29) lets operators “listen to audio associated with video”. The VMS must also ship with a mobile app giving, “live video from up to 500 cameras” on iOS and Android. Nothing in the documents authorises the recording sound on a public record.What is not thereWe looked for what a lawful surveillance procurement would carry. There is no reference to the Standing Order the Ministry cited to the Parliament, to any facial recognition SOP, to Puttaswamy, or to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. There is no privacy impact assessment, no statement of which database faces will be matched against, no similarity threshold, no rule on who may run a search or how a wrong match is corrected. The only retention rule is in Clause 1.7(e) which states that storage “should be minimum 30 days”. That is a disk size, not a data policy; there is no retention period set out for face templates, match logs or plate reads. The ANPR software is specified to read plates at 150 km/h with an accuracy standard of, “90% for day time and 70% for night time” and is not told what list it matches against or whether it links to Vahan, or some other database.Paperwork that does not add upThe bid documents are full of errors, and some show they were copied from elsewhere. The technical specification file attached to this bid belongs to a different tender. Its title refers to “194 Nos. CCTV cameras in the jurisdiction of North District”, and its pages are numbered “Page 35 of 72”, so it was lifted from that earlier bid.The numbers don’t add up either. The summary table in the Request for Proposal (RFP) mixes up two kinds of cameras. One kind is PTZ cameras, which can be turned and zoomed. The other is ANPR cameras, which read number plates. As a result, the bill of quantities orders 43 PTZ and 47 ANPR cameras, but the list of sites actually needs 47 PTZ and 43 ANPR cameras.The specification for the video management software (VMS) is copied from one company’s product brochure. The copying is so close that it still mentions “the VX System” and an “Enhanced Decoder”. GeM’s own rules say a bid written around one vendor’s product is void. Even the map is wrong. The coordinates given for one camera place it about 40 km east of Delhi.The Integrity Pact is meant to guard against corruption in large contracts. This one names two independent monitors who were appointed in March 2018, and their term has since run out under the Central Vigilance Commission’s rules. In April 2025 the Ministry appointed a new monitor to oversee every purchase above Rs 5 crore, but the pact doesn’t mention that monitor at all. These are only a few examples. In all, we have found 28 such defects in the bid. A system that will decide, with no stated accuracy threshold at all, that a face at Delhi Gate belongs on a list is being bought on documents that cannot keep their own camera counts straight.ActionWe are filing RTI applications with the Provisioning & Logistics unit for the status, evaluation and award of this bid and the North District bid, the sanction for 338 cameras, the FRS software, database and threshold, retention periods for footage, face templates and plate reads, whether audio will be recorded, and whether the system feeds the C4i centre. Kindly write to us at media@internetfreedom.in if you have any suggestions on other advocacy actions which we can undertake.Important documentsGeM bid document GEM/2026/B/7850422, 30 July 2026 (link)Request for Proposal, “DRAFT RFP 338 CCTV Final”, with Chapter 3A site list and Chapter 4 specifications (link)Technical specification file as uploaded to GeM, titled for North District (link)Bill of quantities (link)Delhi Police order of 11 October 2026 de-notifying Jantar Mantar, as reported by Business Standard (link)IFF, Delhi Police’s facial recognition sweep at Jantar Mantar is unreliable and unlawful (link)IFF, IFF makes public the Delhi Police order cited for facial recognition (link)The Wire / Pulitzer Center, AI took over policing in Delhi. Who bore the brunt? (link)This article has been republished from the Internet Freedom Foundation‘s website.