...As India pushes ahead with its plan to turn 100 urban centres into smart cities, local governments are using technology like GPS watches to provide data they can use to improve efficiency and tighten budgets.

But city employees, campaigners and technology experts have raised concerns about privacy and the potential misuse of that data, as well as the susceptibility of the watches to failure like weak GPS signal or the devices switching off.

...Under the project, which launched in Chandigarh in February, workers are mandated to wear the GPS watches during their working hours. The watches feed a stream of data to a central control room, where officials monitor the movements of each employee. If workers remove their watches, they are penalised, although there is no comprehensive data available on how many workers have been fined so far, or by how much...

Without a comprehensive data privacy law in India, the personal information of the country’s 1.3 billion citizens is openly available, with no regulation over its use or protection for its users...

...The watches provide data on how many hours they spend at work, how many breaks they take, and the number of work orders they respond to. “In the cases where [workers] are not doing their job properly, salary cuts have been initiated and we have data to show for it,” said Dasarwar, over the phone.

...But Sharma, the gardener, does not see the watches as the key to efficiency. To him, they are a digital tool to “threaten” and exploit workers. “At the end of the day, we don’t know how they will use this data. Wage cuts are just the beginning.”