By IANS,
New Delhi : India is to strengthen its intelligence, vigilance and surveillance systems but this not a knee-jerk reaction to a spate of terror bombings in the country, a top home ministry official said Thursday.
“These measures have been in the pipeline since 2005 as part of the police modernisation drive. It’s just that they’ve gained added impetus now,” Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta said.
He spoke after Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi had briefed reporters on the deliberations at a special cabinet meeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chaired here late Wednesday to discuss the situation in the wake of the terror bombings in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi in which scores were killed and hundreds more injured.
“We are working on various measures to ramp up our preventive mechanism by fine tuning our intelligence, vigilance and surveillance systems,” Gupta said.
“This is a focused scheme for strengthening the Special Branches of the state police forces and ensuring their systematic structuring, which is now lacking. The central government will provide the states all help in this,” the home secretary added.
“Considerable work has already been done on this and 6,000 additional posts have already been sanctioned, the bulk of it to create a dedicated mechanism to focus on research and analysis,” Gupta said.
According to the home secretary regulations would be put in place to ensure that malls, multiplexes and other places that record large footfalls “provide minimum necessary benchmarked security systems that are interfaced with the security system of the state police”.
And, since all of the terror bombings had occurred in urban centres, the centre would assist the states in procuring scanning and vigilance equipment “to develop proper metro policing”, Gupta pointed out.
Asked about the suggestion to create a federal agency to probe terrorist incidents, the home secretary said: “It’s an issue of methodology. A group is looking at what further (anti-terror) measures are required and this (the creation of a federal agency) will be looked into as part of that exercise.
Speaking specifically about the national capital, Gupta said the government had sanctioned 7,612 additional posts and 130 additional vehicles for the Delhi Police.
“The Delhi Police had sought 5,000 additional posts and 170 additional vehicles. The Delhi Police has been wanting to open 11 additional police stations and they will now be able to do so,” the home secretary said.
This apart, 58 additional markets in the city would be wired up with CCTV systems. Only nine markets are currently wired up.