Why some protesters at Jantar Mantar have their faces covered A senior Delhi Police officer confirmed that they were using live facial recognition on protesters at the site, saying it was being done to identify any known criminals. Parked outside the Kerala House building near Jantar Mantar — the heart of the ongoing student protests in the Capital — are two highly-equipped surveillance and monitoring vans deployed by the Delhi Police, keeping a constant watch on people joining the stir. In the bigger van, called the ‘Mobile Command and Control Vehicle’, some Delhi Police personnel are examining live CCTV footage of people at the protest. Opposite to it is a smaller van, called ‘Ikshana’ (Sanskrit for to look or sight), where two officers stand watch as the footage is run through an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-aided facial recognition software, which shows green boxes around each face as it tries to match it with a police database. The Delhi Police had inducted the Ikshana van, describing it in a social media post as a “live CCTV surveillance vehicle”, ahead of the G20 Summit in New Delhi in 2023. The vehicle is equipped with eight “state-of-the-art fixed cameras” for 360-degrees field of view, and is manned by trained CCTV operators. A senior Delhi Police officer confirmed that they were using live facial recognition on protesters at the site, saying it was being done to identify any known criminals. “We have a large database of criminals, with their pictures. So, we run facial recognition on the footage that is received from the various CCTVs in the area, to see if it flags any face the software matches with someone on our criminal database,” said the officer, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media. However, students at the protest said