Intelligence agencies fight terrorism on a shoestring budget

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New Delhi: When a bomb went off in October in West Bengal, police at country's leading counter-terrorism organisation had to hail taxis to get to the scene because they did not have enough cars. The admission by two officers from the National Investigation Agency underlines how poorly equipped it is to fulfil its role of investigating the most serious terrorism cases, cutting off funding to terrorists and putting suspects on trial. The NIA's woes are symptomatic of an overstretched intelligence network at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi must counter the growing threat of Islamist terrorists from Al Qaeda, and possibly also Islamic State, gaining a foothold in the world's largest democracy. The NIA has no officers specialising in cyber surveillance, explosives or tracing chemicals and has been forced to ask companies to decrypt computers recovered at crime scenes, officers said. "The government has its budget constraints; we have done quite well in cracking cases with the resources at our disposal," NIA head Sharad Kumar told Reuters in an interview. When NIA officers eventually arrived at the scene of the blast in West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh, what they discovered was important. Two members of a banned Bangladeshi terrorist group had blown themselves up building bombs, and the NIA believes they were part of a series of plots to destabilise Bangladesh. The NIA, which had only opened its West Bengal branch five days earlier, was caught by surprise by the blast, as were other Indian intelligence agencies.It is now investigating the case and says it is struggling to find a dozen senior terrorist leaders who it said had fled the area after the explosion.


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Intelligence agencies fight terrorism on a shoestring budget - IBNLive