National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID)

Why is in news? States should have a uniform policy on law and order: Union Minister of Home Affairs

Home Minister calls for centralisation of data on terror and other crimes; each State to have a National Investigation Agency office by 2024 with powers to confiscate property in terror cases.

It is an attached office of the Ministry of Home Affairs that has been created as an IT platform to assist the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in ensuring national and internal security, with the ultimate aim of counter-terror.

The 26/11 terrorist siege in Mumbai back in 2008 exposed the deficiency that security agencies had no mechanism to look for vital information on a real-time basis.

NATGRID is an intelligence sharing network that collates data from the standalone databases of the various agencies and ministries of the Indian government.

It is a counter terrorism measure that collects and collates a host of information from government databases including tax and bank account details, credit/debit card transactions, visa and immigration records and itineraries of rail and air travel.

It will also have access to the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems, a database that links crime information, including First Information Reports, across 14,000 police stations in India.

It will be a medium for 11 Central agencies such as the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) to access data on a secured platform. The data will be procured by NATGRID from 21 providing organisations such as the telecom, tax records, bank, immigration etc.

Criticisms:

NATGRID is facing opposition on charges of possible violations of privacy and leakage of confidential personal information.

Its efficacy in preventing terror has also been questioned given that no state agency or police force has access to its database thus reducing chances of immediate, effective action.

According to few experts, digital databases such as NATGRID can be misused. Over the last two decades, the very digital tools that terrorists use have also become great weapons to fight the ideologies of violence.

Intelligence agencies have also opposed amid fears that it would impinge on their territory and possibly result in leaks on the leads they were working on to other agencies.