Anti-terror grid in deep freeze
Seven years after 26/11, a series of intelligence-sharing databases that could prevent another terror strike are yet to get off the ground-an ominous reality given the recent Paris attack.
November 25, 2015 | UPDATED 15:07 IST
In the weeks after the November 26, 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, India's stunned secu-rity establishment went into a huddle. No accountability was fixed for some particularly egregious intelligence lapses, such as the Indian Navy disregarding an Intelligence Bureau (IB) alert about a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) vessel. An LeT mole, David Coleman Headley, breezed in and out of the country at will, without ever being questioned. Even as the government rapidly expanded its counter-terrorism response unit, the National Security Guard, into four metro hubs, it looked for a raft of new measures among which were those to swiftly disseminate intelligence across agencies to warn of another terrorist attack.
The acronyms and capabilities of this three-stage transition to a smart counter-terror network were formidable - the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) would seamlessly connect all of India's over 14,000 police stations; the National Intelligence Grid or NATGRID would link up civilian databases to give security organisations a 360° profile of suspects; and finally, the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), a self-contained terrorism fighting machine.
Nearly seven years later, not one of these intelligence-sharing databases are a reality despite a budget of thousands of crores of rupees and a Rs 800 crore spend on the CCTNS. All the government has to show for itself are a mess of reports, proposals, committees, red tape, turf battles, and the mirage of a robust security architecture.
G.K. Pillai who steered all three projects as home secretary in 2009-2011 says the projects were on steam during then home minister P. Chidambaram's tenure but suffered from 'ownership issues' after he quit in 2012. Officials say that there is a silent battle on in government to restore this architecture, but take it away from the home ministry and place it under the intelligence agencies.
On November 18, just five days after Islamic State (IS) terrorists killed 130 people in Paris, the government proved the truism that all reform in India is crisis-driven. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, headed by Prime Minister Modi, fast-tracked a Rs 2,000-crore CCTNS proposal. The network will now be completed by March 2017, government officials promised.
SLOW-TRACK CCTNS
The CCTNS had its origins in a PolNet system conceived in the late 1990s to link police stations. PolNet never took off. Neither, for that matter, has its successor, the CCTNS, announced after the 26/11 attack. "It is preposterous that 18 years later we don't have the simple network for police stations to share information," says Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management. "The government is still quarrelling over the architecture of the system with the private vendor that is developing it."
The CCTNS envisages fully computerising about 14,324 police stations and about 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country. The project's initial completion date was to be March 2012 but implementation related issues pushed the deadline to 2015. Last year, the CCTNS was merged with an umbrella scheme for modernisation of the police and other forces. Subsequently, the umbrella scheme itself was dropped and this year, no funds were allocated for the scheme.
Meanwhile, the home ministry is coordinating CCTNS with the states to discuss linking up their databases even as various problems have cropped up, say officials who attended these meetings. Project implementation is at an advanced stage in all states except Bihar and Rajasthan. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu use their own software which is funded by the CCTNS project. This commonality of software has caused problems for integration of databases, say government officials, because the databases are not compatible with each other.
States such as Odisha complained that First Information Reports (FIRs) were being registered online only in 300 of their 561 police stations because of uncertain power supply and hardware repair issues. Several states such as Jharkhand complained of slow internet speeds. The states wanted the broadband speeds to be raised from 512 kbps to 2 mbps, which now means fresh contracts need to be drawn up between Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited and the state governments.
"We should have followed a top-down approach, rolling out various phases of the project, but we have instead gone for a bottom-up approach," says a government official privy to the discussions.
State governments want a five-year funding support from the Centre to continue the programme. Only six states have so far implemented the CCTNS network in all police stations.
This is just the modest first stage of getting all police stations to file FIRs online. After this begins the challenge of integrating state databases with central servers and then the second phase with new features such as mobile applications, fingerprint identification systems and an integration with the Integrated Criminal Justice System, a comprehensive database of courts, prisons and forensic evidence.
At an October 16 meeting of secretaries of various agencies connected with the project departments, the finance and the home ministries debated on the fine print-over whether CCTNS was a centrally sponsored scheme or a centrally funded scheme, a reflection of the bureaucratisation of the security architecture.
GRIDLOCKED NATGRID
The NATGRID project had made little progress in the six years since it had been announced in 2009 and a high-profile CEO had been recruited from the private sector. In May last year, the government decided not to extend the contract of its CEO Raghu Raman. However, in May this year, it decided to breathe life into the catatonic project, appointing Ashok Prasad, special secretary (internal security) in the home ministry, to head it. In October, the government put the National Informatics Centre in charge of executing the project and appointed four sub-committees to head different aspects.
Illustration by Saurabh Singh
It was a curious turn of fortune for a UPA-era scheme, the brainchild of then home minister P. Chidambaram. NATGRID synergised private sector strengths to do for counter-terrorism what Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority had done for the direct benefits scheme. The organisation submitted a 672-page detailed project report to the home ministry in November 2010, but this could not make much headway. The intelligence agencies, particularly the IB, saw NATGRID as an interloper and refused to back it. When Chidambaram demitted the home ministry for the finance ministry, the project lost an important votary. It went on the back burner.
The turf battles with other intelligence agencies continue who are loath to sharing information despite NATGRID officials' assurances that they were like "couriers who merely carried parcels from the sender to the recipient". "The agencies fear that NATGRID might become too powerful, that its users will have too much access to information and might even misuse it," says a senior government official.
Prasad revived the Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) that operates under the IB in North Block. He is now being seen as a contender for the post of the NATGRID CEO after he retires on January 31 next year.
THE NCTC DILEMMA
It is with the NCTC that the NDA government is truly confronted with a dilemma. The government has the blueprint of an organisation it drew up in its first spell in power over a decade ago, but vociferously opposed while in the Opposition. In 2000, the Kargil Review Committee proposed a comprehensive overhaul of India's internal and external security. Significant recommendations of the Group of Ministers that examined the report in 2001 included the creation of the NCTC and the MAC. The MAC was to be the first step for intelligence agencies to share information; it would then be subsumed into the NCTC. The concept note for both was prepared by Ajit Doval, then additional director in the IB. The MAC was notified in December 2001 and Doval chaired the first meeting in February 2002.
The NCTC was envisaged as a comprehensive terror-fighting agency with separate arms for gathering, processing, analysing intelligence, and then acting on it. It was modelled on the National Counter terrorism Center of the United States. The MAC would form the nucleus of this new entity. But the near-defunct MAC stirred to life only six years later, after the 26/11 attack.
The agency was re-notified on December 31, 2008 and the first meeting chaired by newly appointed Home Minister P. Chidambaram on January 1, 2009. The MAC grew from a coordination centre where representatives of 25 Indian intelligence agencies shared information. The first meeting saw around a dozen pieces of information being shared. (This year, MAC meetings shared, on average, close to 200 pieces of intelligence.) Yet, there was no sign of the gigantic NCTC.
On February 3, 2012 the UPA government issued an executive order, a central counter-terrorism hub located within the IB. There was an immediate blowback from the states, particularly Opposition-ruled states such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal-which saw the NCTC's provisions to carry out operations across India as an attack on federalism and interference in law and order, a state subject.
The states did not look closely at the provisions of the notification which said that the Centre would act "with the assistance of the state police". The government went on the back foot but did not cancel the executive order, only holding it "in abeyance". So the NCTC is alive, if only on paper.
"The government faces a catch-22," says a senior intelligence official. "It cannot be seen as pushing for an agency it opposed while in the Opposition." Other informed sources say that the government plans to create a vast technical intelligence agency like the US National Security Agency. Agencies such as the NATGRID and Aviation Research Centre will be integrated into the National Technical Research Organisation.
"The requirements of a centralised platform to evolve better intelligence coordination and dissemination is indisputable whether it is embedded in the existing agencies such as the IB and Research & Analysis Wing or NATGRID. That is for the government to decide," says Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP and member of the parliamentary standing committee on defence. The trouble is, that could take years to be realised.
Follow the writer on Twitter @SandeepUnnithan
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