NATGRID to get running in 4 months

NEW DELHI: Set to be operational within 4 months, the National Intelligence Grid has been saved from an untimely end like the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) project.

Among the key projects announced by the home ministry after the 26/11 terrorist attack, NATGRID, the data linking and mining project, will start providing “some information” before the end of the UPA-II term. The initial stage could involve the “real-time linking” of data between various agencies through the NATGRID platform, the official said.

The project may link Central databases with the crime records available with the police to kickstart operations and later proceed with analysing the data to detect and act against terrorist activities.

Various ministries and departments, called provider agencies, that hold 21 citizen databases like bank account details, telephone records, passport data and vehicle registration details, are supposed to link and share their databases in real-time through the NATGRID with the 11 intelligence and investigative agencies, termed as user agencies. The government could soon issue an executive order to give a legal framework and mandate to NATGRID to act as such a bridge.
NATGRID was set up as an attached office of the Home Ministry on December 1, 2010 and further the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) approved Rs 1002.97 crore in June 2012 for implementation of Foundation, Horizon-I and some elements of Horizon-II of the NATGRID Project.

Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde would be laying the foundation stone of a datacenter of the NATGRID project in Delhi next week. At the core of the projects’s technological capabilities will be the datacenter that will be supported by the state-of-the-art technology infrastructure and cutting -edge applications to automate the collation of intelligence information.

The idea is that 21 citizen databases like bank account details, credit card spending, income-tax returns and travel information of every citizen would be available in real-time to 11 different security agencies of the government simultaneously so that any terror design may be detected and countered.

Many private professionals are already on NATGRID’s rolls as consultants in key positions like chief of technology, head of information security, head of strategy implementation and functional specialists in field of banking and telecom.