Delhi police have traced down nearly 3,000 missing children within just four days of launching a trial of new facial recognition system.
After High court commissioned a test run of the software, the technology was put into practical use in 6th April by Delhi Police; Ministry of Women and Child Development said in an affidavit.
The facial recognition technology was used on 45,000 children living in different children’s homes. 2,930 children were recognised between April 6 and April 10.
“India currently has almost 200,000 missing children and about 90,000 lodged in various child care institutions,” a spokesperson for the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) campaign group told The Better India website. “It is almost impossible for anyone to manually go through photographs to match the children.”
On April 5, the Delhi High Court expressed displeasure when it was informed by the Delhi Police’s special commissioner (crime) that it has obtained its own FRS but it was unable to do trial run of the application as the WCD ministry has not provided the data.
The court questioned the Centre for not sharing the details of missing children with the police. Following which, a meeting between the ministry and Delhi Police officials took place.
The ministry provided data on some seven lakh missing children along with their photographs on the child tracking portal, after which the Delhi Police began the test run of the software.