. NATGRID plays following important roles in India’s security:
- National Intelligence Grid or NATGRID is an intelligence grid connecting the databases of 21 core security agencies to collect comprehensive patterns of intelligence. These databases include railway and air travel, income tax, bank account details, credit card transactions, etc.
- Despite prone to such terror attacks, we don’t have a well formulated database of these terror networks.
- The idea is to collate and analyse vital data to get the complete view of a situation. Details that take one to three months can be had within minutes.
- NATGRID will tackle the problem of coordination between various law enforcement agencies in various ministries.
- Due to federal nature of government, the coordination at center and states level is also lacking and in the case of any emergency, the response mechanism is not effective. Here too NATGRID will be useful.
NATGRID has following shortcomings:
- NATGRID is facing opposition on charges of possible violations of privacy and leakage of confidential personal information.
- NATGRID will have access to all kinds of data under one roof and can also prove to be counter-productive if misused.
- Crucial intelligence information, if available to many agencies, can be leaked and used against the nation.
- No state agency or police force has access to its database thus reducing chances of immediate, effective action.
- NATGRID also faces issues like consolidating data from a huge population, lack of compatibility with data sets in regional languages, risk of spies ratting out vital information to outside sources and security from external attacks.