Hyderabad's municipal body to introduce facial recognition attendance system for 25,000 workers

GHMC intends to leverage facial recognition to not only record attendance of its workers but also generate reports and calculate wages.

The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corproation (GHMC), the urban local body that oversees governance of Hyderabad, is set to introduce facial recognition-enabled attendance system for 25,000 of its staff working in the sanitation, entomology, veterinary, and other departments of the corporation, Moneycontrol has learnt.

This comes at a time when there has been rampant adoption of facial recognition technology in governance and in private sectors, even as concerns remain regarding misidentification, bias, and so on. This also comes at a time when surveillance on sanitation workers and ASHA workers, for instance in Haryana, have received criticism from various quarters.

The GHMC is looking for an "AI-driven mobile based facial recognition biometric attendance management system", a solution which has been shortened to a mouthful -- AIMFRBAMS. The municipal body is envisaging a one-time registration of workers using photograph and photo ID proof "preferably by Aadhaar service if desired by GHMC," a tender document read.

Following that, the real time authentication of workers will be taken up using the image of the face stored in the database.  The solution, apart from recording attendance, will also be able to generate reports and calculate wages.

Currently, the municipal body is using Aadhaar-based biometric attendance system where the attendance is captured by authenticating fingerprints. However, the GHMC notes that the application is dependent on internet connectivity as it has to complete the Aadhaar authentication.

"..the GHMC desires to use (facial recognition).. system for 100 per cent coverage of attendance by removing held devices and internet dependencies for attendance and other field level challenges faced (viz. faded fingerprints in the existing attendance system)," the tender document read.

GHMC has said that the application and the database can be stored in the Telangana State Date Centre or any other virtual private cloud specified by the municipal body.

Data risks

Facial recognition technology has raised significant concerns related to privacy, civil liberties, and potential misuse.  In many cases, individuals are not aware that their facial data is being collected and analysed. Experts have also raised concerns regarding the potential of the usage of the facial recognition data beyond its initial intended purpose.

In 2023, the Parliament passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill giving India its first legislation that specifically lays down provisions for safeguarding personal data. Its provisions include that of purpose limitation, where it is mandated that a data fiduciary (be it a government or private body) can only use personal data for the purpose specified at the time of obtaining consent of the data principal.

However, the DPDP Act also has provisions that can empower the Central government to exempt any government agency from the ambit of the DPDP Act and its provisions.