India has witnessed several terrorist attacks and many riots influenced by such groups. In all these incidents India has lost many innocent souls and the most important is it has lost the faith of people on Intelligence Bureau, who could not track or avoid these from happening in the first place.
Now Prime Minister's main concern is to gain the faith back, which is why he is focusing more on making the team strong enough to tackle such issues even before they take place.
Some sources from Government had informed that the youth is actively taking interest in joining IB even though they carry high degree of education. Advocates, MBAs, Doctors, Engineers, Accountants and many from highly educated background have shown great interest in joining IB and to become 'spies'.
The youth varying from age 18-27, belonging to different states of the country are even willing to leave their highly paid, well-settled jobs to work for the intelligence team for national security.
'A young boy even left his job where he was earning Rs 1.5 lakh per month to become an intelligence officer,' said a top official.
An Officer said that it is hard to gather information from the 'hardzones' (disturbed/ conflict areas). He further added, 'Being a field intelligence officer, ACIO, requires a lot of motivation and skills. At a time when militants are upgrading and new threats are emanating from the cyber world, the IB using age-old methods and people was not working.'
An official said, 'These are the boys and girls who are go-getters for the IB. All they need is a telephone, a tele-printer and a computer and they send their daily reports to their local SIBs and headquarters. They are the eyes and ears of the government'.
IB is the most essential arm in India for gathering information and intelligence assessment for the government. But from the past years the quality has been degraded as told by an officer, 'quality intelligence was not being generated'. These all loop holes have encouraged many small terrorist groups to form and harm the nation.
The officer went on to say, 'Intelligence Bureau's men on the ground don't get the kind of facilities Pakistan's ISI operatives have access to. What was happening for a long time was that IB officers on the ground filed their 'daily reports' like a routine with whatever limited information and knowledge they had from their area/sources. Sometimes, the alerts sent to the states were recycled and sufficient verification wasn't done or there was no coordination at the local SIB (Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau) level'.
He further added, 'The nationalist feeling comes in an ACIO when he/she is treated well'.
A senior home ministry official confirmed that 'the Narendra Modi government has put more focus on better intelligence officers on the ground and providing everything they need so that country has a safe environment'.
According to a report from Parliament in 2013 filed by the then state for home RPN Singh, there was shortage of 8000 officers in intelligent service of the country.
He had said that IB had 18,795 personnel on its rolls, against a sanctioned strength of 26,867 - a shortfall of over 30%. Senior home ministry officials told in an interview that the problem still persists but youngsters are now showing more interest in joining IB.