Delhi Police Defends Facial Recognition on Accuracy. Puttaswamy Asks About Authority First.

Proportionality Has Four Steps. Delhi Police Answered One. The

Puttaswamy proportionality test, laid down by the Supreme Court in 2017, asks four separate questions before any state surveillance measure can be held constitutional: does it have legislative backing (legality), does it pursue a legitimate state aim, is there a rational connection between the measure and that aim and is it the least restrictive way to achieve it (necessity). Delhi Police's affidavit on facial recognition at Jantar Mantar answers questions two and three at length - legitimate aim (identifying "hardened criminals"), rational nexus (2,873 flagged, 92 with over 10 cases)

• but it does not point to a specific statute authorising FRS deployment at a protest site. That is not a minor gap. Under Puttaswamy, a surveillance measure that fails the legality prong does not get to argue its way back in through accuracy or restraint.

The

Rule as Written, the Rule as Practiced The rule as written, per Puttaswamy, treats "legitimate state interest" and "legislative backing" as two different things - the first is a policy justification, the second is a specific legal source of authority.

India has no dedicated facial-recognition statute; police forces have deployed FRS under general policing powers, first for tracking missing children following a Delhi High Court directive, then expanded through practice to crowd control at protests and riots.

The rule as practiced treats "legitimate state interest" as sufficient on its own - which is exactly the gap Senior Advocate N. Hariharan's argument that "FRS cannot be used at all" is pointing at and exactly why the Supreme Court chose the word "proportionality" rather than simply asking whether the police acted reasonably.

Why "Accuracy" Isn't the

Same as "Lawful" Delhi Police's strongest point - that FRS "does not automatically capture, create, generate or maintain profiles of every individual" and targets only those with prior criminal records - genuinely addresses the necessity and rational-nexus prongs.

But even a perfectly targeted, minimally invasive surveillance tool fails Puttaswamy's test if it operates without a specific statutory basis, because the legality prong exists precisely to prevent the executive from justifying surveillance solely by pointing to its own good intentions and good results.

A tool can be accurate and narrow and still be unlawful, if no legislature ever authorised its deployment in the first place. For an aspirant, the exam-relevant insight is that "proportionality" in Indian constitutional law is not a single overall reasonableness check - it is four sequential, independently failable conditions and a state defence that only engages the later prongs while staying silent on the first has not actually met the test, however persuasive its accuracy data may sound.