‘A virtual fortress’

Railway network is being used by traffickers to lure millions of women, kids.

The system is being trialled in tech hub of Bengaluru.

Most major railway stations in India will use facial recognition to fight crime by the end of 2020, a senior official said, in a move that digital rights campaigners on Tuesday warned could breach people's privacy in the absence of stringent laws. 

The system is being trialled in the tech hub of Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore, where about half a million faces are scanned every day and - using artificial intelligence (AI) - matched against faces stored in a police database of criminals. 

"The railways will become like a virtual fortress," a senior railways official told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

"Without a physical, brick and mortar boundary wall, we will be able to make the whole system more secure," said the official who declined to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media. 

Stretching from the foothills of the Himalayas to sandy southern beaches, India's railway network is one of the biggest in the world, carrying about 23 million people - or the population of Taiwan - every day. 

But it is also used by traffickers to lure millions of women and children to cities with the promise of good jobs, only to sell them into sex slavery or trap them in bonded labour where they are forced to work to repay a debt. 

The rise of cloud computing and AI technologies have popularised the use of facial recognition globally, from tracking criminals to counting truant students.  While supporters of the software say it promises greater security and efficiency, some technology analysts say the benefits are unclear and come at the cost of privacy losses and greater surveillance.