SOURCE: ET
The home ministry has asked the Fifteenth Finance Commission (FFC) to create a National Internal Security Fund (NISF) with an initial corpus of Rs 50,000 crore to meet capital expenditure, a good part of which would likely be on real time surveillance and intelligence gathering technology and gadgets. In a March letter to the FFC headed by NK Singh, the ministry has said that constitution of a separate fund was justified as internal security is a shared responsibility of the centre and states.
The home ministry and FFC did not respond to ETs questions emailed to them on August 26.
The government extended the term of the FFC by 11 months in November 2019 and also approved an addition to the terms of reference enabling the commission to look for ways to provide non-lapsable funds for defence and internal security. It also specifically authorised it to see how such a funding mechanism could be operationalised. ET had reported in detail on the proposal to set up a Rashtriya Suraksha Nidhi being pushed by the defence ministry. Now the home ministry wants an NISF to be evolved separately and exclusively managed by it. “States have a shared responsibility for internal security but not for defence,’’ the ministry argued in a memorandum reviewed by ET.
The ministry said states and union territories owed over Rs 52,000 crore as on January 2020 in dues for deployment of central paramilitary forces. It wants that money to start the corpus. The FFC in its interim report had recommended sectoral grant for police training and housing along with others such as health, judiciary and rural connectivity. Home ministry believes the choice of training and housing limits the scope of internal security dimension in an ever evolving information technology scenario’’. It said the sector should coverdimensions like setting up cyber-crime detection and prevention infrastructure, acquiring IT tools and capabilities for real time reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence gathering, setting up of world class forensic infrastructure etc’’.
The National Crime Records Bureau has been implementing an ambitious technology programme to connect and network all police stations and their databases in the country. By December 2019, it had spent Rs 1,680 crore on the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System, a national project aimed at creating a centralised, searchable, digital, real-time database of crime. It also plans to set up the world’s largest Automated Facial Recognition System, a centralised Web-based application with a repository that would act as a foundation for a national level searchable platform of facial images available to all police stations.
Police forces are built and maintained by state governments and union territories but the centre too maintains five sets of paramilitary which are trained for specific tasks and are deployed as back-up in states during emergencies such as riots or big events such as elections. While maintenance of the forces is the centre’s responsibility, the cost of deployment is shared by states.
The ministry wants the FFC to follow the disaster risk financing model and the National Disaster Risk Management Fund in creating the NISF. It argues that even though budgetary allocations have been rising, most of the funds are used for meeting day to day requirements or revenue expenditure, leaving very little for equipment and assets or what is known as capital spending. The ratio of revenue expenditure in the total budget has risen from 78% in 2009-10 to 90 percent 10 years later, it says.
