In June this year, the home ministry launched Abhigyan presenting it as a faster way to verify identities — a modern tool for frontline policing. The mobile app allows police and law enforcement agencies to scan fingerprints on the street and instantly pull up criminal records, pending cases, or other sensitive information within seconds. It brings biometric verification out of controlled environments – airports, police stations, border checkpoints – and into everyday public spaces. But its impact extends well beyond convenience or administrative efficiency.In a country where policing disproportionately targets minorities, migrants, and the poor, this new capability raises urgent questions about misuse, coercion, and profiling. Plus, wrongful detention too is a recurring problem in India. People are often picked up based on vague suspicion, flimsy evidence, or misidentification.Introducing biometric scanning into this environment magnifies existing risks. And without strict protocols, this can be used to intimidate, coerce, or harass individuals.“In a country where cops can arrest you for drinking tea “suspiciously,” this will just enable more abuse of citizens’ rights,” Member of Parliament Asaduddin Owaisi posted on X.Also read: Full Text | Apar Gupta on the Delhi Police’s Illegal SurveillanceSoutik Banerjee, advocate on record at the Supreme Court of India, believes that the objective of the government seems two-fold: firstly, to create dense and inter-related databases which make surveillance and profiling instant, and secondly, to weaponise the profile of an individual at the street police level. “This carries a grave risk of ‘instant justice’, or police beatings and custodial torture being encouraged on the basis of the profile of individuals, and poses a grave risk to civil liberties,” he adds. The fear isn’t unfounded considering the police behaviour witnessed at the recent student protests in New Delhi, where demonstrators were detained, questioned, and in several cases manhandled for merely assembling. The episode showed how quickly routine policing can escalate into coercion and violation of constitutional rights. The architecture of a surveillance stateIndia does not have a dedicated surveillance law. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 offers broad exemptions for the state, allowing law enforcement to bypass consent and notice requirements. The Abhigyan app would structurally qualify for these exemptions and police will be able to collect and process biometric data without clear statutory limits, independent oversight, or mandatory audit trails. The Supreme Court’s judgment in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs. Union of India (2017) recognised privacy as a fundamental right, but without a surveillance framework, constitutional protections remain largely theoretical in day‑to‑day policing.The International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) has documented how systems like Central Monitoring System (CMS), Networking Traffic Analysis (NETRA), National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), and various facial recognition projects have expanded the state’s ability to track communications, movement, and identity. These systems operate largely without public debate or independent oversight.Also read: Surveillance is No Longer Something Only Done by States to CitizensAbhigyan fits neatly into this ecosystem. CMS monitors phone calls and digital communications. NATGRID integrates databases across agencies. Facial recognition systems identify individuals in public spaces. Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS) and Inter‑Operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) consolidate criminal and policing data. Abhigyan brings biometric verification to the street. Together, these systems create a real‑time, interoperable surveillance network that dramatically expands the state’s gaze. Sure, none of these systems is inherently abusive on its own, however, the combined effect is a state capable of identifying, tracking, and profiling individuals — often without judicial oversight or statutory safeguards. Predictive policing in a biased systemAbhigyan is not just a lookup tool. The app integrates with the CCTNS and the ICJS, two massive databases that together form the backbone of India’s digitised policing infrastructure. This integration enables more than record retrieval. It supports pattern analysis, hotspot identification, and what officials describe as “predictive policing”.Predictive policing has a troubling global history, producing discriminatory outcomes across countries. In the United States, algorithmic systems repeatedly flagged Black and immigrant neighbourhoods as “high‑risk,” creating feedback loops where over‑policed communities generated more data, which algorithms interpreted as higher risk, leading to even more policing.Several cities discontinued such systems after independent audits found them unreliable and discriminatory. Some implementations in Europe too have faced similar criticism, with studies showing that predictive tools often amplify existing biases rather than reduce crime.India’s policing landscape, shaped by caste, religion, and class hierarchies, is even more vulnerable to such distortions. Without transparency about how risk scores are generated or how officers are trained to interpret them, predictive policing risks becoming a self‑fulfilling prophecy.According to Prateek Waghre, a technology policy researcher, law enforcement personnel are already able to act with minimal safeguards or have few disincentives for not adhering to them, when they do exist. Several surveys in the past (2025, 2018) have also identified a proclivity for biases based on various socioeconomic factors. “It (Abhigyan) amplifies the existing civil liberties risks through profiling, heightened bias, and related downstream actions that may be pursued as part of such profiling, including harassment, intimidation, wrongful detention, and even violence,” he explains. Constitutional rights at a crossroadsIndia is building a digital panopticon through a series of interoperable tools – faster than it is building the legal and institutional safeguards needed to govern them – that collectively reshape the relationship between citizens and the state. Abhigyan is one of the most consequential of these tools because it operates at the street level, where power imbalances are sharpest and safeguards weakest.Waghre believes that an underlying surveillance framework with oversight from independent authorities outside the executive branch is a non-negotiable before such a widespread rollout of biometric checks. The launch of Abhigyan also comes at a time when several states are expanding facial recognition systems, predictive policing pilots, and integrated command‑and‑control centres. During the recent student protests, for example, Delhi Police deployed facial‑recognition systems fed with live camera feeds, drone footage, and smart glasses captures, creating what many civil liberties groups described as a “biometric map” of the protest site.#InPhotos | Inside Delhi Police’s Mobile Command and Control Vehicle stationed outside Jantar Mantar, police personnel monitor multiple camera feeds during the ongoing protest. | @ritishizing pic.twitter.com/PmsKirOQiM— The Wire (@thewire_in) July 22, 2026The debate is no longer about digitising policing — that shift is already underway. It is whether it can do so without eroding civil liberties in the process. Abhigyan may improve investigative efficiency, but efficiency cannot be the sole metric for evaluating policing tools. The real test is whether these tools can coexist with constitutional protections or quietly erode them.Abhishek Baxi is an independent technology journalist exploring the intersection of technology, culture and society. He writes on consumer tech and enterprise innovation, analyses Big Tech, unpacks technology policy and shares unsolicited opinions on X as @baxiabhishek.