Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday proposed to set up a “Model Anti-terrorism Structure” under the purview of National Investigation Agency (NIA), to be followed by the States for better coordination in the fight against terror.
Speaking at the two-day 3rd ‘Anti-Terror Conference 2023’, the Union Home Minister was of the view that the hierarchy, structure and standard operating procedures of investigation of all State anti-terrorism agencies should be made uniform for better coordination between the Central and State agencies.
‘Be innovative’
Amit Shah also urged the the NIA and State agencies such as Anti-Terrorism Squads (ATS), and Special Task Force (STF), to think out of the box and take innovative measures to counter terrorism, besides investigating such cases. The fight against terrorism requires collaboration from the global level to the grassroots, involving various States within the country, as well as international cooperation, he pointed out at the conference organised by the NIA.
All anti-terrorism agencies must adopt a ruthless approach so that a new terrorist organisation cannot be formed, the Minister asserted, as he called for dismantling the entire ecosystem.
Several dignitaries including the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Nishith Pramanik, Home Secretary, Director Intelligence Bureau, Director General NIA, as well as Director Generals of Central Armed Police Forces, State Police Chiefs and senior officials from the Union and State governments were present at the conference.
He acknowledged that Modi government’s tough stand against challenges like crypto, hawala, terror-funding, organised crime syndicates, narco-terror links have yielded very good results, but, he added that, still a lot more is to be done.
AI in fight against terror
The government has prepared many database verticals in the last 5 years and both the Centre and State agencies should make multidimensional and AI-based use of the data to successfully fight against terrorism, Shah suggested. The database, he elaborated, should be used by every police station and officers for investigation, prosecution, prevention and action.
Talking about data sharing, he stated Inter-Operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) — CCTNS have been implemented in 99.93 per cent cases in 16,733 police stations. Similarly, as many as 22,000 courts have been connected to e-Court and about 2 crore prisoner data is available through e-Prison, 1 crore through e-Prosecution.
Apart from that, more than 17 lakh prosecution data and excess of 17 lakh forensic data from e-forensics are available. The National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) has more than 90 lakh fingerprint records. Under Integrated Monitoring of Terrorism (i-MoT), data of 22 thousand terrorist cases is available for monitoring UAPA registered cases. And data of more than 5 lakh narco-offenders is available under NIDAN, i.e. National Integrated Database on Arrested Narco-Offenders.