CRYING NEED TO CUSTOMISE AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGIES FOR HOMELAND SECURITY

Current Affairs Technology :

As low intensity conflicts, terrorism and Insurgency take centrestage as the wars of the future, there is a crying need to customize technology and products already on the shelf to meet the needs of homeland security. New R&D initiatives in collaboration with the academia and industry with the government (user) need to be taken expeditiously to bridge the technology gaps to counter the emerging threats, Dr. V K Saraswat, Scientific Advisor to Raksha Mantri & Secretary, Defence R & D, declared.

Addressing the two-day conference on ‘Science & Technology for Homeland security- 2010’, organized by FICCI and the Ministry of Home Affairs, Dr. Saraswat said, “Recent incidents have shown that a new kind of internal war, totally nonconventional, is being waged by the terrorists, insurgents and anti-social elements using most common home grown technologies in an innovative way, which always have an element of surprise and high degree of sophistication.” These operations, he said, were asymmetric, non-platform centric, multi-factorial and combine various military and non-military concepts.

Dr. Saraswat said that realization of systems and devices for homeland security requires and close interaction with the security forces and meticulous planning to provide them with technology solutions by using existing technologies and making engineering solutions to customize them to meet their needs through a collaborative approach with industry and academia.

He said that DRDO had analysed the technology requirements projected by the security forces, both military and para-military, in a bid to provide solutions for surveillance & reconnaissance, enhancing day & night vision capability of fighting forces, communication & jamming, arms & ammunitions, non-lethal weapons, explosive detection, personnel protection and combat support. DRDO’s technologies developed for supporting the soldier as a system in the battlefield could be the building block for solutions to arm the para-military forces, he said.

DRDO, he said, had projected and mapped the available technologies for threat scenarios for operating in forests, urban & coastal areas, mountain regions, desert location, aerial scenarios, in high rise buildings, combating infiltration across the LOC, hostage crisis etc. For surveillance & reconnaissance, DRDO has developed an unmanned aerial vehicle – Nishant- and battle field surveillance radar to detect and track moving ground target and also mountain radar to detect and track aerial targets in mountainous terrain.

Some of the new initiatives in this direction are the development of NETRA, a quad rotor mini UAV weighing about 0.5 kg. with a flight endurance of 30 minutes and a fixed wing mini air vehicle (2 kg. Class) which will have an endurance of 1 hour and can provide telemetry and video data form a range of 10 km. Detection of concealed targets below thick foliage and monitoring terrorists in closed room from a remote location were some of the new R&D thrust areas.

Dr. Saraswat said that miniaturization was under way of Briefcase Satellite Terminal and Combat Net Radio for communication and voice and data transfer over low bandwidth and to access network resources from a remote location. New initiatives on networked situational awareness to assess own position and the position of the adversary in jungle operations were already at an advanced stage of development. Mr. U K Bansal, Special Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, underlined the need for active and intense public-private partnership to address the multifarious and diverse security challenges through appropriate technology induction. FICCI, he said, could provide an interface between the technology provider and the government. Mr. Mati Kochavi, Chairman, AGT International, Switzerland, pointed out that today’s terrorist had access to the capability and the technology possessed by nations. “We live in an age where a group of 30-40 people can have access to weapons of mass destruction and change the strategies that nations need to follow,” he said, adding that the strength of a terrorist outfit had to be determined not by the strength of the organization itself but by the strength of the network of the orgainsation and the potential of its connections.

The conference is deliberating on issues such as coastal and maritime security; naxalite insurgency; CBRNe threats and mitigation; capacity building and governance; surveillance and detection technologies; critical infrastructure protection and the role of ICT and GIS for homeland security.