UPA speeds up, clears 7 plans to fight terror

QUICK FIXING TERROR: Terror has come home to roost and is now forcing the UPA to act fast.

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Rajdeep Sardesai

26/11: Terror comes precariously close

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New Delhi: A 13-year-old boy had his head blown off when a bomb dropped by two young men from a motorcycle exploded in a crowded market in the Mehrauli area. Seventeen people were injured, many seriously in the congested Mahrauli Sarai electronic market in the city's southern outskirts. The bomb exploded during the afternoon rush.

The bombers, believed to be in their mid-20s, wearing jeans with their heads covered by helmets, sped away on a black Pulsar motorcycle according to eyewitnesses. A similar motorcycle was found abandoned elsewhere in the city.

Police said the dead boy, Santosh Kumar, picked up the bomb concealed in a lunch box and wrapped in a black polythene bag and tried handing it back to the motorcycle riders, thinking they had dropped the packet by mistake. As the bomb began emitting smoke, the frightened child dropped it and tried to run away. But within seconds, it exploded, killing him and felling many men and women in the vicinity.

Even as the Capital came under the attack of terrorists for the second time in a fortnight, authorities quickly sounded a high alert in the city.

Six bomb blasts in the last two weeks have brought terror home to the nation's Capital. Just four days after the first round of blasts on September 13 - as a strained Delhi Police grappled for answers - 7,000 new posts were finally sanctioned by the Finance Ministry, a proposal it had been sitting on for four months.

These are some of the proposals that are finally out of the pipeline.

• 10,000 soldiers sanctioned for the Cobra battalion to fight Naxals. The proposal cleared in the first week of September was hanging fire since 2007.
• The Intelligence Bureau was sanctioned 6,000 operatives where 4,000 were asked for, post the Delhi blasts.
• Additional posts of senior officials for the Border Security Force were cleared two weeks ago for better border management.
• After the Ahmedabad blasts, 150 posts for a multi-agency centre were cleared after four years.

For the moment, stop gap-arrangements are being made.

Union Home Secretary V K Duggal said, "Filling up the vacancies will take time. For the moment, ex-servicemen and retired officials will be used."

But all this is just a drop in the ocean for a country which has one of the worst police-population ratios in the world - 120 policemen for 1 lakh people and 14,000 police stations for 6 lakh villages - which is why increasing the police force in the Capital will help, but only after the sleeper cells in Azamgarh are gotten rid of.

The UPA Government's mindset has always been that increasing human resources leads to unproductive expenses. However, it is this unproductive mindset that is now helping terror come home to roost and forcing the Government to realise that it's time to put its money where its mouth is.