Hi-tech fence: India to get tips from Israel

India will send a team to Israel to learn from its experiences in erecting the security barrier along the West Bank and Gaza Strip to assess technologies that New Delhi could implement at its fence with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

India will send a team to Israel to learn from its experiences in erecting the security barrier along the West Bank and Gaza Strip to assess technologies that New Delhi could implement at its fence with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

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Home minister P Chidambaram, who had launched the fencing project in 1986, told a group of MPs this week that the government was exploring use of modern technology in border management and would send a team to Israel to assess technologies used there.

Israel’s security fence of concrete and steel razor wires — complete with electronic sensors and close-circuit cameras — has been as useful to stop terrorist strikes as it has been controversial.

The fence helped reduce attacks on Israeli settlements but has been controversial due to Israel’s decision to build the barrier, at places, deep into the occupied West Bank.

India had voted against the fence on the West Bank at the UN general assembly in 2004.

At the meeting of the consultative committee, the minister said how India too used technology — sensors and satellite images — to track infiltrators.

But the home minister wants the team to evaluate technologies used elsewhere in the world. He had conceded just last month that the border with Bangladesh was still “open and porous”.

Technology, however, is only one component, a home ministry source said, citing recent orders to get smugglers caught on the border to identify locations from where they crossed the border and penalise the local BSF commander.