AI Vans, Smart Glasses: How Delhi Police Built A Biometric Map Of A Student Protest

Mohammad Junaid had been at Jantar Mantar for 35 days. An LLB student from Ghaziabad, he had no formal role in the Cockroach Janta Party protest. He kept volunteers fed while thousands of students demanded the education minister's resignation over the NEET exam-leak scandal.

On the night of July 24, as the protest wound down, Junaid was returning from Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital after getting an anti-rabies injection. He says police officials picked him up from Delhi, put him in a vehicle, and covered his eyes. For the next five to six hours, they questioned him about who was funding the food supplies. He could not see their faces, their names, their uniforms.

They took his phone, made him unlock it, and went through it.

He was dropped in a jungle clearing on the Dehradun-Mussoorie Road, roughly 250 kilometres from where he had been taken. He hired a cab back.

In Ghaziabad, the Uttar Pradesh Police had already arrived at his family home in Masoori. His father was detained. His minor brother was picked up. Personal documents were seized — Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, bank passbooks. In Meerut, his married sister's husband and father-in-law were also taken into custody. All of them were later released.

"They had all my data," Junaid told Decode. "They did not even spare my sister in Meerut. This should not have happened in any democracy."

Junaid has since moved the Supreme Court, alleging illegal detention and harassment through an intervention application in a pending writ petition by RJD MP Manoj Kumar Jha.

His account opens a question that the dispersal of the protest crowd has done nothing to answer: what is happening to the data collected at Jantar Mantar, who has access to it, and how long will it exist?

Everything Was Being Recorded

From the moment the sit-in began on June 20, Jantar Mantar operated as a controlled entry zone. Bags were checked, sometimes twice, at every access point. Movement was funnelled through layers of barricades.

Drones hovered overhead, sweeping the crowd in real time. CCTV cameras tracked the ground. From elevated watchtowers, fixed cameras kept a persistent, unblinking field of view.

Videographers, hired through third parties at roughly Rs 1,500 a day, worked in shifts and submitted their footage directly to the Delhi Police. Out of about 70 videographers deployed across the capital, around 30 were stationed at Jantar Mantar alone.

And then there was Ikshana.

 The Ikshana van parked at Jantar Mantar

A police van branded with the Delhi Police crest and the word "Ikshana" — Hindi for "vision" — was initially parked near the protest entrance before being moved closer to Kerala House. Inside, eight AI-powered cameras mounted on a telescopic mast provided a 360-degree field of view, scanning faces in the crowd and comparing them against a police database. Green rectangles appeared around detected faces on the monitors inside, alongside a numerical "face accuracy" score.

When Decode walked past the van on June 20, and again on multiple days over the following month, it was rarely static in function. Officers could be seen stepping in and out of the vehicle at regular intervals, often pausing to look at the screens inside before returning to the ground. From outside, the screens were only partially visible, and officers inside were quick to shoo away anyone who tried to look in.

CP Plus, the Indian CCTV company identified as the hardware supplier, initially had a 2023 social media post describing the Ikshana system as fitted with "Advanced AI-powered" cameras and "Varifocal Bullet Cameras". That post was removed from their website over the weekend following the surge in coverage. CP Plus later said it had supplied the hardware, but that operational decisions and database use were carried out by Delhi Police.

In videos circulating on social media after the ‘Chalo Sansad’ march, a senior police officer stationed at Jantar Mantar during the protest was seen wearing what appear to be smart glasses—identifiable by a thicker frame and a small embedded lens near the hinge. The officer was identified as Sandeep Lamba, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police, who was later removed from duty after he was seen slapping a woman protester on July 20.

A separate mobile application called Abhigyan, linked to the National Crime Records Bureau's National Automated Fingerprint Identification System, extended biometric capture to fingerprints. Police were also seen writing down the Instagram handles of people arriving at the site.

According to reports, Delhi Police has identified 2,873 people with previous criminal records who were present at the protest.

Nobody has explained what happened to the data collected on everyone else.

"Why Do You Need My 200 Photographs?"

For those who lived it, the surveillance was physical — a sensation as constant as the July heat.

Anjali, a Delhi University student and AISA member who had been at the protest since its first day, told Decode the monitoring began to feel excessive almost immediately. "We have confronted the police, and the answer is always security. But why do you need my 200 photographs for security purposes?"

When new faces showed up in the student tents, police came asking who they were and where they had come from. Meanwhile, Anjali said, phones and belongings were being stolen inside the protest site. That, apparently, was where the "security" ran out.

Videographers continuously recorded the protest throughout the day.

For Harshit, a Delhi-based artist and member of the queer community, the consequences of being constantly recorded are unevenly distributed. "I am visibly out, but what about those who are not?" he said. "This is a serious breach of privacy."

Harshit had already dealt with a version of this problem weeks earlier, when content creators secretly filmed him at a transgender rights protest at the same site using Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses — a case Decode reported in June. He had to take action against the creators himself, getting the content taken down through mass reporting.

"At least there, I know who to hold accountable," he said. "But what do I do when the police record me like this? I don't even know how it will be used."

"I have a right to privacy and a right to protest. One cannot be compromised for the other."

The most intimate layer of surveillance was also the hardest to spot.

Aishe Ghosh, the student activist and former JNU Students' Union president, had spotted the police officer wearing the smart glasses. "I was in the mini-truck with Abhijeet Dipke and others when we set out to march on July 20," she told Decode.

"When the officer entered the truck to detain us, I saw him wearing a pair with a camera."

"We can only imagine the extent of minute data they are trying to collect. Even when they detain us, they are capturing us without consent. We don't know what kind of crackdown this data could enable later,” she said.

Two Courts, No Answer

On July 15, Ghosh moved the Delhi High Court with a plea challenging mass surveillance at Jantar Mantar.

Her petition argued that persistent biometric monitoring creates a chilling effect, infringing on rights to free speech, assembly, and privacy under Articles 19(1)(a), 19(1)(b), and 21 of the Constitution. The petition asked the court to declare mass surveillance of protesters unconstitutional and to direct the destruction of all personal data collected during the demonstrations.

The government called it "normal surveillance" and not excessive monitoring. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta defended the checks as "absolutely necessary" and in "legitimate state interest." Hearings have been postponed since.

Rajya Sabha MP A.A. Rahim has gone further, filing a petition under Article 32 in the Supreme Court through advocate Subhash Chandran K.R. His plea names the Union of India, Delhi Police, the NCRB, Aditya Infotech (CP Plus's parent company), and Dimension NXG (the maker of AjnaLens) as respondents.

The petition argues that the surveillance was carried out in a "complete legal vacuum". Neither Delhi Police standing orders governing protests nor the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, explicitly permits biometric surveillance of people at lawful assemblies.

The government described the surveillance as routine and not excessive.

It further alleges that Delhi Police's own response to Right to Information applications — obtained through a second appeal before the Central Information Commission — confirms the force has never conducted a privacy impact assessment for its use of facial recognition technology, has no published rule governing it, and has no retention policy for the biometric data it collects.

The afterlife of surveillance data

The protest wound up on July 25. It ended with assurances that no FIRs would be filed against participants. But reports have since emerged of detentions and cases being registered in states like Bihar and Assam, and Junaid's experience suggests the data trail has already been put to use.

Apar Gupta of the Internet Freedom Foundation said much of this surveillance operates without any clearly defined legal framework. "Data retention is happening without a clear legal authoritisation," he told Decode.

The closest existing reference point is the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022. The law allows biometric data to be stored for up to 75 years, with the NCRB as custodian. It provides for deletion in cases of acquittal or discharge — but even that provision has a carve-out: a court can still direct that data be retained, after recording reasons in writing.

The law, however, applies to active criminal investigations — situations where an FIR has been registered. That is the gap. The students at Jantar Mantar were participating in a lawful assembly. Most of them are not accused of anything. What governs the data collected from them?

With the Digital Personal Data Protection Act still not in force, Gupta said, "there is a lack of clarity as to what law is actually applicable here."

He also pointed to a history of scope creep. Facial recognition was first introduced in Delhi after a 2017 Delhi High Court order in the Sadhan Haldar case — to trace missing children. Since then, the same technology has been deployed during the 2020 North-East Delhi riots, the 2021 Red Fort breach, and the 2022 Jahangirpuri violence. Each deployment expanded the original use case further from its starting point.

At its core, the system does not produce certainty. "It's not a one-to-one match — it's a probability score," Gupta explained. Images from crowded, chaotic spaces are matched against databases that are not publicly disclosed, and the size of those databases — cited in different official disclosures at figures ranging from 20,000 to 350,000 criminal records — has never been confirmed.

"So, there is every possibility and potential for the facial recognition system to be retrospectively used to identify or misidentify the people there and then prosecute them."

And accountability remains elusive. "The system itself does not make the police accountable."

What the Crowd Left Behind

For Ghosh, the broader danger is not one protest but a pattern. "Governments across the world are weaponising data," she said. "We have seen how data has been used for targeting people in Gaza. In India, we may be moving towards extensive data collection where, from my biometrics, the State can access all my personal identifiable information."

"This becomes a deterrent. People will think twice before coming out to protest. That is why we have to resist this model."

The students and bystanders scanned at Jantar Mantar may have no legal mechanism to challenge their inclusion in the police's biometric databases, or to demand deletion of their data, for as long as those databases exist. There is no published retention policy. There is no disclosed list of who can access the records. There is no privacy impact assessment. There is no statutory basis.

 People scanned may have no legal way to contest or erase their data.

What remains, after the slogans have faded and the barricades have been cleared, is a collection of faces, fingerprints, and metadata sitting inside systems whose rules of operation have never been made public — collected from citizens who were exercising a constitutional right, and stored with no known expiry date.

Junaid's plea before the Supreme Court seeks directions restraining police from further coercive action against his family and ensuring any investigation is conducted strictly in accordance with law. As of the publication of this story, the court has not issued notice on his application.

Delhi Police has not responded to Decode’s queries on data retention policies for surveillance footage and biometric data collected at the protest site. This story will be updated if and when a response is received.