In July, Bhuwan Ribhu received some very good news.
The child labor activist, who works for Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, had launched a pilot program 15 months prior to match a police database containing photos of all of India's missing children with another one comprising shots of all the minors living in the country's child care institutions.
He had just found out the results. "We were able to match 10,561 missing children with those living in institutions," he told CNN. "They are currently in the process of being reunited with their families." Most of them were victims of trafficking, forced to work in the fields, in garment factories or in brothels, according to Ribhu.
This momentous undertaking was made possible by facial recognition technology provided by New Delhi's police. "There are over 300,000 missing children in India and over 100,000 living in institutions," he explained. "We couldn't possibly have matched them all manually."
Locating thousands of missing children is just one of the challenges faced by India's overstretched police force in a nation of 1.37 billion people.
India has just 144 police officers for every 100,000 citizens, compared to 318 per 100,000 citizens in the European Union. In recent years, authorities have turned to facial recognition technology to make up for the shortfall.
New Delhi's law enforcement agencies adopted the technology in 2018, and it's also being used to police large events and fight crime in a handful of other states, including Andhra Pradesh and Punjab.
But India's government now has a much more ambitious plan. It wants to construct one of the world's largest facial recognition systems. The project envisions a future in which police from across the country's 29 states and seven union territories would have access to a single, centralized database.
