In 1997, Babar Ali Mandal migrated from Nadia district in West Bengal to Mumbai in search of work.
In the three decades since, he has made Mumbai his home. He runs a small workshop to make footwear in Govandi, a slum cluster located in the east of the Maharashtra capital.
In his free time, he often scrolls through social media sites.
What he sees is distressing. “A lot of people from my state are being targeted for speaking Bengali,” he said. The fear of being labelled Bangladeshi has intensified in the last one year, he added.
As Scroll has reported, the police in several states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Maharashtra, have over the last year accused Indian citizens of being Bangladeshis and thrown them across the border, without giving them time or opportunity to prove their citizenship – in violation of the Centre’s own rules.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has gone a step further. Last week, at a media event, Fadnavis said that the state government is building an artificial intelligence tool to help it detect Bangladeshi immigrants.
According to a report in Hindustan Times, which cited officials aware of the project, the language-based verification AI tool “will analyse speech patterns, tone and linguistic usage to help identify suspected illegal Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingyas in the state”.
It is being developed by the state information technology department in collaboration with IIT Bombay. However, Maharashtra IT minister Ashish Shelar told Scroll that the project is being handled by the chief minister’s office and he did not have the “finer details” about it.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.