Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) is rapidly transforming surveillance and law-enforcement practices by converting the human face from a biological attribute into a searchable digital identifier. This paper examines the legal tension between public-sector use of FRT and the protection of fundamental rights in India, where identification capacities have developed faster than the legal framework governing them. Adopting a doctrinal-comparative methodology, the study analyses Article 21 of the Constitution of India, the Information Technology Act 2000, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, the proposed Facial Recognition Technology (Regulation of Police Powers) Bill 2023, and leading judicial authorities including Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India. It also considers comparative materials from the European human-rights system, the GDPR, the EU AI Act 2024, United States biometric privacy approaches, and relevant policy scholarship. The analysis finds that India lacks a dedicated statutory framework regulating state deployment of FRT, despite privacy being constitutionally protected under Article 21 and subject to legality, necessity, proportionality, and procedural safeguards. Comparative jurisdictions increasingly treat biometric surveillance as a high-risk practice: the GDPR classifies biometric data used for unique identification as special-category data, while the EU AI Act restricts real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces, subject to narrow law-enforcement exceptions and authorisation safeguards. These developments reflect growing concern that FRT may undermine privacy, free expression, equality, and democratic participation, particularly because of risks of mass surveillance, function creep, and algorithmic bias. The paper concludes that India’s present reliance on executive practice creates a serious regulatory vacuum between constitutional guarantees and administrative deployment, requiring a rights-based statute grounded in transparency, judicial oversight, purpose limitation, and effective redress.