In a move that will ramp up the security budget in coming days, the government is looking at an immediate review of measures to monitor coastlines as initial investigations in the well planned Mumbai terror attacks have pointed to major intelligence lapses on the part of the Indian Coast Guard.
Union home minister Shivraj Patil has convened a high-level meeting on Saturday of the country?s top defence officials including Army chief General Deepak Kapoor, Navy chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta, coast guard director general Vice Admiral Arif Contractor, IB director PC Halder and home secretary Madhukar Gupta, in which a review of the present security setup will be done.
The focus, in particular, will be on the vulnerable 7516 kilometre-long coastline as a separate ministerial review on Friday identified it as the critical doorway used by the terrorists. This meeting was attended by the national security advisor MK Narayanan and Cabinet secretary KM Chandrashekhar besides home ministry officials. The meeting is understood to have attempted to go into reasons as to how such a large number of terrorists managed to get into Mumbai undetected, that too in the busy Mumbai harbour area where there is a round the clock presence of coast guard.
The entire Mumbai coastal area comes under the purview of the coastal security scheme, which was launched by the union home ministry with much fanfare two years ago and which entails sanctioned coastal police stations in nine coastal districts and four union territories. Its outlay for last year stood at Rs 329.52 crore and of the 73 sanctioned police stations, 55 are already operational.
These include 12 police stations in Maharashtra, ten in Gujarat, three in Goa, four in West Bengal and one each in Kerala, Puducherry and Daman and Diu. Each coastal police station is supposed to be equipped with over 200 boats, 150 jeeps and 300 motorcycles for mobility of police personnel on the coast and coastal waters. They are also provided with special interceptor boats with the coast guard imparting specialised training to different state police personnel in mounting maritime vigil.
The ease with which terrorists managed to sail into the Mumbai harbour, with a huge cache of arms and ammunition, however, shows that the forces manning the coastal waters were not able to intercept the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks.