India's NIA on the cheap hampers war on militants

hen a bomb went off last month in West Bengal state, police at India's leading counterterrorism organisation had to hail taxis to get to the scene because they did not have enough cars.The admission by two officers from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) underlines how poorly equipped it is to fulfil its role of investigating the most serious terrorism cases, cutting off funding to militants and putting suspects on trial.The NIA's woes are symptomatic of an overstretched intelligence network at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi must counter the growing threat of Islamist militants from Al-Qaeda, and possibly also Islamic State, gaining a foothold in the world's largest democracy.

The NIA has no officers specialising in cyber surveillance, explosives or tracing chemicals and has been forced to ask companies to decrypt computers recovered at crime scenes, officers said."The government has its budget constraints; we have done quite well in cracking cases with the resources at our disposal," NIA head Sharad Kumar told Reuters in an interview.When NIA officers eventually arrived at the scene of the blast in West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh to India's east, what they discovered was important.Two members of a banned Bangladeshi militant group had blown themselves up building bombs, and the NIA believes they were part of a series of plots to destabilise Bangladesh.The NIA, which had only opened its West Bengal branch five days earlier, was caught by surprise by the blast, as were other Indian intelligence agencies. It is now investigating the case and says it is struggling to find a dozen senior militant leaders who it said had fled the area after the explosion.

So far Modi's government has not responded to the NIA's request made months ago to double the staff, recruit more specialists and create a national centre of excellence to train officers.