It seemed like any other day at the Shaheed Hemu Kalani Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, a government school in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. The students sat attentively in class. They were wearing their uniforms, white shirts and ties, and the teacher paced through the classroom as he taught. But high in opposite corners of the room, one thing had changed: two newly installed closed-circuit television cameras watched over the class.
The day, 6 July 2019, marked the official launch of the Aam Aadmi Party-ruled Delhi government’s plan to install two CCTV cameras in every government-school classroom. The decision came on the heels of a wider AAP push to surveil the city. In June, after a prolonged tussle with the lieutenant governor’s office, the government officially launched a scheme to fulfil the AAP’s campaign promise to install 2,000 cameras in public places in each of Delhi’s 70 assembly constituencies. A month later, Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister, directed the public-works department to procure another 150,000 cameras, bringing the total number of cameras to be installed close to three hundred thousand. The move was also part of the AAP government’s greater investment in public education. Twenty-six percent of the 2019–20 Delhi budget was dedicated to education; the AAP has more than doubled the previous Delhi government’s education spending.
Unlike the typical CCTV cameras that dot the city, whose footage is only monitored in central control rooms, the video feed from the school cameras will be available to parents of students in government schools. The DGS Live mobile app, currently available only for the Lajpat Nagar school, will allow parents to log in for 15 minutes at a time, three times a day, and access the footage in their child’s classroom. Ravinder Kumar, the officer on special duty at the Delhi education department’s Care Taking Branch, told me that cameras had been installed in nearly three hundred of the 728 government-school buildings in Delhi.
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