Now, a bank to store terror info

With the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) still stuck, the Centre has operationalised a data bank at the Intelligence Bureau (IB) as a one-stop-shop on terror and terrorists that will help in a seamless flow of information till the district level in the country. Rajesh Ahuja reports.

With the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) still stuck, the Centre has operationalised a data bank at the Intelligence Bureau (IB) as a one-stop-shop on terror and terrorists that will help in a seamless flow of information till the district level in the country.

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Named as the National Memory Bank, it is vested with the IB's Multi Agency Centre (MAC). It will have details about terror organisational structure, insurgent and naxal outfits, interrogation reports of arrested operatives and their profile. The data can accessed by any stakeholder in MAC or its subsidiary called SMAC at the state level.

According to sources, once a terrorist is caught in any part of the country, his profile and interrogation details will be made available to all police forces at the central and state level through the bank.

Even if a certain name crops up in the interrogation of an arrested operative, the state or central unit can dig into their records to see if any other case is registered against him anywhere in the shortest possible time. The process of uploading information in the bank has already started

When P Chidambaram was Union home minister, he proposed formation of the NCTC for seamless operational and intelligence coordination between the counter-terror units of the country at the central and state level. But the NCTC ran into rough weather due to opposition of various state governments. If the NCTC had come into being, the MAC would have been subsumed by it.

Around Rs 70 crore has been spent to start the bank. During the phase-II around 460 districts will be connected with the bank at the level of SP to facilitate pumping of ground level information in the MAC.