The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day.
Start here
Four steps. Once you see the chain, the news stories and the campaign asks make sense.
Cameras, phone records, travel bookings, ID databases, and other systems gather information about people as they move through daily life.
That information sits in government and police databases — sometimes for years — ready to be searched later.
A “grid” or query system can pull many databases at once. In India, NATGRID is built to do this for designated agencies.
Live facial recognition tries to identify faces in a crowd against a database while people are still standing there — not later on a recording.
India, right now
Mass surveillance shows up here as live face-matching at protests and a national data grid with no independent watchdog. Read the short versions below — then go deeper in Learn if you want sources.
~45,000
NATGRID queries reported per month
119 cr
NPR resident records in reach
0
Independent NATGRID oversight bodies
Delhi Police have been reported to use FRT-equipped vans at protests, including gatherings at Jantar Mantar. A court challenge is pending. A normal CCTV records; live FRT tries to name you on the spot.
Read the full explainerNATGRID lets agencies query many kinds of government data from one place. Reporting puts usage in the tens of thousands of queries a month. There is no independent oversight body written into a dedicated law.
Read the full explainerIn 2017 the Supreme Court ruled privacy is a fundamental right. Any state intrusion must clear three checks: a clear law, a legitimate aim, and proportionality. That is the legal hook for Garudex’s asks.
Read the full explainerAfter you understand the problem
Specific demands tied to openings that already exist — a pending case, a missing oversight body, and the privacy test the state must pass.
Stop live FRT at protests and public gatherings until Parliament passes a law that defines when, how, and against which databases it can be used.
Delhi Police FRT vans (reported as “Ikshana”) at the July 2026 Jantar Mantar protests are already before the Delhi High Court. A pause is a concrete interim ask while that petition is pending — not a wish for abolition in the abstract.
Require independent, judicial oversight for NATGRID — not a shutdown. Every comparable intelligence-grid system in other democracies has an oversight body; this one runs on Home Ministry executive authority alone.
There is no dedicated statute and no independent oversight body today. Oversight is the gap; that is the ask.
Publish quarterly aggregate numbers — scans run, queries made, by which agency. No identities. Transparency without doxxing.
Without numbers, the public cannot check whether the intrusion is proportionate under India’s 2017 privacy ruling. Disclosure is the minimum condition for that test to mean anything outside a courtroom.
Want the longer explainers? Open Learn
Go deeper
Short cards with sources. Read these before you file a report so the words mean the same thing to everyone.
After you know what you're looking at
A public Surveillance Incident Report log — document surveillance gear you see (vans, camera clusters, drones), not the crowd. Entries are reviewed before they appear. Crowdsourced and unverified until then. Unsure what counts?
0 published on the public register
Public register
No published reports yet. File one after you understand what you're looking at — it appears here after review.