The Karnataka Authorities’s proposal to introduce an Synthetic Intelligence-driven facial recognition attendance system in colleges has sparked a powerful backlash from educationists, rights teams, and civil society organisations.
A coalition of 31 specialists and organisations wrote to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah Monday, urging him to roll again the initiative, and as a substitute strengthen community-based accountability within the schooling system.
The Division of Faculty Training and Literacy has introduced plans to hyperlink a mobile-based facial recognition system to the College students Achievement Monitoring System (SATS) to observe absenteeism, and monitor beneficiaries of presidency welfare schemes corresponding to noon meals.
The scheme was piloted in a couple of colleges and highlighted within the 2025-26 Karnataka Funds. Nonetheless, its implementation has been delayed, and critics argue that it shouldn’t be launched in any respect.
Specialists concern that capturing and storing kids’s biometric information may expose them to critical dangers, together with surveillance, misuse, and trafficking. They pointed to previous situations the place information collected by the schooling division, corresponding to SSLC examination outcomes, was shared with non-public teaching centres for business functions.
“If such delicate facial information is harvested and misused, it may well have unimaginable penalties, together with falling into the palms of kid traffickers and criminals,” mentioned Niranjanaradhya V P, Convener, Folks’s Alliance for Basic Proper to Training (PAFRE).
Considerations additionally centre on the misuse of know-how for sexual exploitation. The joint assertion highlights that advances in synthetic intelligence have made it doable to morph kids’s photos into specific content material, fuelling an increase in sextortion instances worldwide. Activists argue that school rooms aren’t public areas however protected environments the place kids ought to really feel protected.
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“By introducing surveillance by facial recognition, we’re creating vulnerabilities for kids as a substitute of defending them. Faculties should stay protected areas, not zones of surveillance,” mentioned Niranjanaradhya.
The assertion additionally attracts consideration to wider dangers in India’s “leaky information atmosphere,” the place CCTV footage and private particulars are sometimes misused or leaked. It notes high-profile instances of breaches in public safety techniques, together with the Digi Yatra app, and situations of personal movies being circulated from surveillance feeds. Critics argue that if even safe aviation techniques face breaches, information collected from schoolchildren can be even tougher to safeguard.
Internationally, a number of nations have restricted or banned the usage of facial recognition applied sciences in instructional settings. The UN Particular Rapporteur on the Proper to Training has additionally really helpful a world prohibition on such surveillance in colleges. Even China, one of many world’s leaders in AI surveillance, has moved to curb its use in school rooms.
Activists additional cautioned that the push for facial recognition displays a misplaced religion in technology-driven “fast fixes.” They argue that actual accountability in colleges can solely come from empowering native communities, academics, and oldsters.
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“The federal government already mandates Faculty Improvement and Monitoring Committees in each college. If these are strengthened and supported, they will guarantee far better accountability than any surveillance software ever may,” mentioned Niranjanaradhya.
The joint assertion additionally warned that deploying facial recognition in colleges would put kids’s privateness, dignity, and security in danger whereas providing little actual profit. The signatories — together with teachers, youngster rights organisations, academics’ unions, mother and father’ associations, and public well being specialists — have demanded that the federal government drop the plan altogether and introduce a coverage banning facial recognition in schooling.