Based on a qualitative study of a large village in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra, which witnessed the gram panchayat installing closed-circuit television cameras in response to a sudden communal flare-up, the impact of CCTV surveillance and how people negotiate with intrusive technology is discussed. The research suggests a paradoxical situation as people valued a more secure environment, but it came at the cost of their freedom and individual agency. CCTV surveillance led to a reconfiguration of public spaces into the surveilled and the non-surveilled, leading to different norms being followed in these spaces. The use of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras for surveillance has given rise to new forms of social control across societies. CCTV surveillance of public streets, motivated by concerns of security and crime prevention, began in the United Kingdom and other European countries in the late 1990s and then spread across the globe. The idea of predictive policing, implying the use of algorithms to analyse data to predict crimes, justified a greater reliance on surveillance technology in the public domain (Lau 2020). In India, CCTV surveillance began in semi-public spaces, such as banks, supermarkets, bus depots, and hospitals and then slowly spread to open-street surveillance, mainly in cities (Norris et al 2004). More recently, China and India emerged as the countries with the highest densities of CCTV surveillance cameras in urban areas when the 130 most populated cities in the world were mapped for the prevalence of CCTV cameras (Hindu 2021). The diffusion of CCTV surveillance has given rise to debates around privacy, regulation of bodies, and individual freedom (Taylor 2002). This literature is dominant in the urban sphere; there are hardly any studies on surveillance practices in rural areas. This gap is sought to be addressed through this paper, which contributes to the discussion on surveillance in general. The idea of a smart village in India