National Investigation Agency still doesn't have a roof

It is more than a month now since the much-hyped National Investigation Agency was established. Even as the Manmohan Singh government pitched the federal agency as a key tool to combat terrorism after the November 26 terrorist strike in Mumbai, the Ministry of Home Affairs, however, is still searching for space to house it.

MHA officials told Business Standard that Radha Vinod Raju, the recently-appointed Director General of the NIA, had been functioning from a room in the Sahastra Suraksha Bal headquarters located in the CGO complex in New Delhi ever since his appointment on February 15.

The Parliament had approved the Bill to establish the NIA hastily in December 2008.

Bypassing the usual practice of referring important bills to the Standing Committees, the NIA Bill was approved by most of the political parties within two days of its introduction. For the last almost two years, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been advocating the need for a federal agency to tackle terror.

Raju, sources said, is busy framing rules for the new agency while he is also awaiting a team of five core officers of the Indian Police Service (IPS) to join him to begin the work of the new organisation.

The NIA chief has picked his men from among the IPS officers across the country.

However, the bureaucratic procedures, which entail repatriation of the chosen officers from their states to the Centre, are again taking time. The NIA has been given sweeping powers to investigate any terror case in any part of India and can force states to hand over their cases to the central agency.

The MHA, sources said, has also asked the Delhi government to allot it a suitable office space for this Federal agency, which is empowered to investigate crimes like terrorist attacks, which have national and international ramifications.

Raju, IPS officer of the 1975 chosen for his known investigating skills which he had proven during his tenure with the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) headed that investigated the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi at Sreeperumbdur in Tamil Nadu in 1991.

The SIT had cracked the assassination plot which was hatched and executed by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam) of Sri Lanka.