By IANS,
New Delhi : With India having revamped the Multi-Agency Centre for collecting and analyzing intelligence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Tuesday announced the setting up of a permanent Crisis Management Group to handle the fall-out of major terrorist attacks in the country.
“I recently had the occasion to mention in Parliament that the time has come for us to establish a permanent Crisis Management Group to handle the fall-out of major terrorist attacks anywhere in the country. This is now being established,” he said while addressing chief ministers at a conference on internal security.
Detailing the steps taken by the government following the Mumbai terror attacks, Manmohan Singh said the process of strengthening maritime security against asymmetric threats from the sea and plugging loopholes in the country’s air space was underway.
“The process of augmenting and strengthening our counter-terrorist forces has already begun. What we hope to achieve is closer scrutiny and attention as well as a more rapid response to new and emerging threats. Our aim is to achieve the concept of total security,” he said.
With a string of terror attacks having convulsed the country last year, the prime minister said time had come to emply techniques such as structured analytic methodologies to convert the mass of information into actionable intelligence.
“Applications such as threat assessment modeling and artificial neural networks will have to be added to the existing analytic techniques. Three dimensional modeling of critical infrastructure is a new aspect that needs to be introduced. In special situations, we could even think of a virtual operations centre,” Manmohan Singh added.
Earlier, Home Minister P. Chidambaram too made a strong case for a proper command structure in the event of a terror attack.
“There must be no ambiguity or confusion about who is in-charge; who will have overall authority over the different forces; who will deploy the forces according to the needs of the situation; and who will be held accountable for the success of the operation,” he said.