National Counter Terrorism Centre gets cabinet nod

The cabinet committee on security on Thursday cleared the decks for setting the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) under the Intelligence Bureau (IB) rather than an independent superstructure as originally envisaged.

The cabinet committee on security on Thursday cleared the decks for setting the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) under the Intelligence Bureau (IB) rather than an independent superstructure as originally envisaged.

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Home minister P Chidambaram, who had conceived of the centre as an umbrella body for all security agencies at a lecture in 2009, said the truncated version of the NCTC was the beginning. Government sources said the NCTC could be up and running within the next three-four months.

"Based on our experience, what we find are the shortcomings, deficiencies or safeguards that have to be built in, it will eventually grow into the kind of a structure that I had envisaged in my (2009) lecture," he said.