AI Surveillance And The Right To Privacy In India: Constitutional Challenges And Legislative Gaps
- IJLLR Journal
- Jul 8
- 2 min read
Mayank Uday Kumar, LL.B., Faculty of Law, University of Delhi (Campus Law Centre)
ABSTRACT
The Supreme Court's nine-judge bench decision in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India (2017) recognised privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, yet the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 creates what this article terms a constitutional paradox: it recognises and operationalises informational privacy rights for ordinary data processing while simultaneously exempting, through Section 17, the very state surveillance systems that pose the most significant threat to that same right.
Adopting a doctrinal methodology, the article analyses constitutional jurisprudence, the relevant statutory framework, the parliamentary record of the DPDP Act's enactment, and comparative material from the European Union and the United States, to assess the extent to which India's AI surveillance infrastructure satisfies the proportionality standard articulated in Puttaswamy and the equality and due process guarantees under Article 14. Drawing on documented deployments including facial recognition use during the Anti-CAA protests of 2019-2020, at the Kumbh Mela of 2019 and the Maha Kumbh Mela of 2025, through the expanding NATGRID platform, and via the DigiYatra system the article finds that India's principal AI surveillance systems operate without clear statutory authorisation, that Section 17 substantially exempts state surveillance from the DPDP Act's protective obligations, and that documented accuracy disparities in facial recognition technology raise independent concerns under Article 14's guarantees of equality and non-arbitrariness. The article concludes by proposing a dedicated legislative framework, independent oversight, and mandatory impact assessments addressing both privacy and equality concerns.
Keywords: AI Surveillance; Right to Privacy; Puttaswamy; Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023; Facial Recognition; NATGRID; Article 14; Algorithmic Bias; Proportionality.
