Mumbai calling, Mr Sibal
Jacob Koshy -
Thursday, November 27, 2008 10:06 PM
A few days after the Jaipur blasts this year, (14th May) Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Science and Technology, scrambled a press conference where he told us about a technology that the government had imported from an American company for combating terror. The Central Electronics Limited, a government research organisation, was entrusted with the task of customizing this technology to Indian conditions. And what was this technology? " We can't tell you that right now. It's a very advanced, non-intrusive surveillance system and it's being tested in the New Delhi Railway station," the minister said. Piecing scraps of info from other officials around, I gathered it was some kind of Big Brother system--where cameras in public places would monitor people's movements, take pictures and pass those details onto to a central server. So I guess if you are sweaty faced and look particularly fidgety at the railway station, you're pictures are going to make its way to some policeman's computer monitor, with a blinking "suspected terrorist" tag on your pic, and soon you will have cops from all over swarming the place.) Other than divulging the cost of the technology, Rs 24 crore (He refused to tell us the American company involved) the presser was a waste of time.
After the Delhi blasts (13th Sep) I again quizzed him on the technology. "Oh, we are testing it in the Delhi Cantonment. In the next few months, we'll tell you more about it." (That was the day, the minister launched the CSIR's Open Source Drug Discovery initiative.
I called him up today, hoping for some kind of reaction to today's events. His personal secretary promised that my call would be returned. I'm still waiting.
How many calls more, Mr Sibal?