Tribune News Service
New Delhi, September 22
With Union Home Minister giving a push to the inordinately delayed National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) say if the project continues to progress at the existing pace, the facility will be operational by early next year.
Sources said the Home Minister recently held a meeting of senior officials and reviewed the progress of the Rs 3,400-crore project, conceptualised following the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. The technology-driven NATGRID was conceptualised as a robust real-time intelligence-gathering and sharing mechanism related to immigration, banking, individual taxpayers, air and train travels. Sources said the project was aimed at solving “entity resolution” through artificial intelligence. NATGRID will not have a database of its own. Rather it will have a collated database connected with software. “The database collated from 17-18 agencies will ensure that among the innumerable crime suspects, the search is narrowed down to just two or three,” a senior official said. The search will be security agencies’ very own closed group to arrive at the right answer for every query within a fraction of seconds. The officials said the database had a pool of mobile numbers, vehicle numbers, passport numbers, Aadhaar numbers, arms licences, bank accounts, travel details and social media accounts.
For information the agencies have to currently fan out and compete with one another. But NSTGRID will have answers in one place. The officials said that fully functional, the system would will help in real-time tracking of terror operative/suspect. In the first phase, 10 user agencies and 21 service providers will be connected with NATGRID. In the later stages, 950 organisations and in subsequent years another 1,000 will be connected to it.
The 10 agencies, which will be able to access the facility are the IB, RAW, CBI, ED, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Financial Intelligence Unit, CBDT, CBEC, Directorate General of Central Excise and Intelligence (DGCEI) and NCB. Initially, no state agency would be given direct access to NATGRID data, “but on requirement basis, they may approach NATGRID through any of the 10 user agencies”, explained an official.
While NATGRID has finalised the process for getting the data on about eight crore tax-payers from the Income Tax Department, talks are on with the Civil Aviation Ministry, Director General of Civil Aviation and airlines to get information on domestic travellers.
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