BANGALORE: V Balachandran, ex-IPS officer, former special secretary, Govt of India and co-author of a report on Mumbai 26/11, spoke to the Times of India on how to make Bangalore resilient in the face of the risks it faced from terror outfits. Here are his seven-point agenda for a safer and secure Bangalore.
Adopt a pro-active approach to man-made disasters like terror attacks. It is not just enough to have adequate police and specially trained commandos but the security preparedness should reach the next level.
Put in place a ‘preventive structural security’ at private establishments, especially in hospitality industry.
CCTVs should be used to predict any eventuality in the next moment and not to record or watch what has happened. Don’t deploy Quick Response Teams (QRT) tasked with anti-terror action for personal security of officials.
Do away with police-centric traditional intelligence gathering. Utilise open source intelligence. Each agency should contribute inputs to the intelligence gathered by police. There should be discipline on roads to make way for emergency forces to reach the incident spots. Vehicles used for emergency services should be brought under one agency. There needs to be a proper chain of command.
There should be one public information officer with a one-point media centre to brief the media about the progress of tackling the terror attacks to nip any rumours and leakag of classified information to the enemy lines.
Not only police but also the medical, revenue and fire forces should be insulated whenever cities like Bangalore face a terror incident. Police cannot do much work in isolation situations like police vehicles being deployed as ambulances rather than fighting terrorists should be avoided.
