Five days after the Cockroach Janta Party called off its protests at Jantar Mantar, Delhi Police floated a ₹15.66 crore tender for 338 CCTV cameras fitted with facial recognition, microphones and crowd-detection software. The sites listed in the bid documents trace the roads connecting Parliament, Jantar Mantar, Ramlila Maidan and the India Gate hexagon - the very corridor the Commissioner of Police would, ten weeks later, designate as the city's new protest ground.
A tender that followed a protest
The sequence is stark even if the causation is not proven. The NEET paper-leak protests ran from early June to late July 2026 and ended with the resignation of the Union Education Minister. On 30 July, the Provisioning & Logistics unit of Delhi Police placed a bid on the Government e-Marketplace for 248 fixed cameras, 43 pan-tilt-zoom units and 47 automatic number-plate readers, all required to carry facial recognition licenses for at least a tenth of the fixed and PTZ cameras. On 11 October, the same police commissionerate de-notified Jantar Mantar and named Ramlila Maidan, Burari Ground and CBD Ground Shahdara as the new designated protest sites. Of these, only Ramlila Maidan - three kilometres from Jantar Mantar - sits inside the tender's coverage map, along with its principal approach roads through Delhi Gate, Turkman Gate and Asaf Ali Road.
What the specifications actually demand
The technical annexures leave little to inference. Fixed cameras must run analytics for intrusion, tripwire, people-gathering detection, tamper alerts and face recognition simultaneously. PTZ cameras must support face recognition outright, and even the number-plate cameras are required to perform face detection. The video-management software must embed a facial recognition system "with perpetual license" and give operators a mobile app streaming live feeds from up to 500 cameras. Every camera type - fixed, PTZ and number-plate - carries a built-in microphone with audio input and output, and the software explicitly allows operators to listen to audio tied to video footage. One clause instructs that cameras be placed "at suitable height" specifically to "identify and capture the face of a particular person roaming around" at sensitive points. There is no mention anywhere of a legal basis, an accuracy threshold, or a data-protection framework.
Absent safeguards, present errors
What is missing matters as much as what is specified. The 76-page request for proposal contains no reference to the Standing Order the Home Ministry cited before Parliament, no privacy impact assessment, no named database against which faces will be checked, and no retention period for face templates or match logs - only a minimum 30-day storage requirement, which is a disk specification, not a privacy rule. The number-plate software is required to read plates at 150 km/h with accuracy claims that drop to 70 percent at night, yet no linked database is identified.
The document itself is riddled with internal defects. Its technical annexure is lifted from an earlier 194-camera North District tender, complete with that bid's page numbers still visible. The bill of quantities transposes PTZ and number-plate camera counts against the site list. The video-software specification appears copied from a single vendor's brochure, naming that company's proprietary "VX System" - a practice that would ordinarily void a public procurement under the marketplace's own rules. One GPS coordinate places a camera roughly 40 kilometres outside Delhi, and the integrity pact names anti-corruption monitors whose terms lapsed years ago, with no reference to the monitor appointed in 2025 to oversee contracts of this size.
What is still unknown
Delhi Police has told the Supreme Court it ran facial recognition on Jantar Mantar crowds last July and generated nearly 2,900 "matches" - a figure reporting has already called unreliable. A Supreme Court committee is separately examining the legality of surveilling protesters. Whether this tender is financed outside the city's existing Safe City camera programme, whether its award has been signed, and whether its output will feed into the police command centre remain open questions, now the subject of formal right-to-information requests. What is already on the record is simpler: the ground chosen for future protest is ground the police had already moved to watch.