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We thin to quantify the calamity of the panic onslaught successful Mumbai successful November 2008, by the implicit 160 lives lost. “26/11” was beamed into the surviving rooms of the country’s elites for 3 days done broadcast television. The sounds of bullets and explosions, the dome of the Taj Hotel swallowed by smoke, and the valour of the Mumbai Police played retired alongside a dependable refrain successful studios and by commentators of a “major quality failure”. That complaint was not conjured retired of grief alone.
The study by the high-level enquiry committee connected 26/11 and the worldly placed earlier Parliament pointed to lapses successful the handling of quality alerts. This “intelligence failure”, it was argued, was the inability to stitch scattered fragments into a coherent warning. David Coleman Headley, a cardinal conspirator, travelled to India connected respective occasions, leaving a paper-and-pixel way successful visa applications, edifice registries and question itineraries. Security hawks offered a seductive proposition. Would the lives mislaid been saved had those disparate information points been aggregated and analysed successful time?
Evolution of a ‘crown jewel’
Out of that intelligence aftershock emerged organization expansions, but the technological crown jewel was the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID). Its premise was a middleware interface that would let 11 specified cardinal agencies to query databases crossed 21 categories, routed done supplier organisations spanning individuality and assets, question and movement, fiscal quality and telecommunications.
Even successful its aboriginal days, the unease was visible. NATGRID was archetypal publically announced connected December 23, 2009, successful a code by the Home Minister.’
The law question that arose instantly was not whether the authorities whitethorn ever behaviour surveillance, but connected whether a task of this magnitude could run without a statutory model and autarkic oversight. This regular reported connected February 10, 2010 (“‘Big Brother’ fears stall Chidambaram information plan”) that “Ministers raised queries astir safeguards and said determination was a request for further study”. Yet, connected June 14, 2012, NATGRID was cleared not done an Act of Parliament, but by enforcement bid and the Cabinet Committee connected Security, with a first-phase allocation of ₹1,002.97 crore branded “Horizon–I”.
For years, NATGRID’s changeless delays led radical to judge it was ‘vaporware’. A task that existed connected insubstantial but did not really enactment arsenic a monolithic hunt motor for tracking citizens that was lone announced to calm nationalist choler aft the 26/11 attacks. Well, it is present becoming a world that tin nary longer beryllium ignored.
Two caller reports successful this regular (“National quality grid gains traction arsenic Central agencies, constabulary scour for information”, December 8, 2025 and “Intel grid linked to NPR with details of 119 crore residents”, December 26, 2025) uncover a quantitative and qualitative enlargement of this wide surveillance project. First, pursuing a nationalist league of Directors General of Police successful Raipur successful precocious November 2025, chaired by the Prime Minister, States were asked to “scale up” NATGRID usage. The archetypal study besides said that NATGRID receives astir 45,000 requests each month. Worse, access, erstwhile presented arsenic the sphere of cardinal quality and investigative agencies, is being widened to constabulary units, including officers down to the fertile of Superintendent of Police.
An integration that unsettles
The 2nd improvement that is adjacent much unsettling is the reported integration of NATGRID with the National Population Register (NPR). The NPR is simply a repository with the details of 1.19 cardinal residents, with a relational cartography of households, lineages and identities. It is besides politically volatile, repeatedly invoked successful the acrimony surrounding the National Register of Citizens (NRC) arsenic a prelude to citizenship filtering. Grafting a colonisation registry onto an quality query level crosses a cardinal boundary. It shifts the paradigm from tracking discrete events arsenic quality inputs to the mapping each Indian. NATGRID’s improvement is not unfolding successful the technological clime of 26/11, but successful 2025, amid accelerated advances successful instrumentality learning and large-scale analytics.
This regular has besides highlighted the deployment of “Gandiva”, an analytical motor susceptible of “entity resolution”.
This is further explained arsenic providing the triangulation that is required to determine whether fragmented records beryllium to the aforesaid individual. Paired with facial designation that tin trawl telecom Know Your Customer (KYC) databases and driving-licence records, this is nary longer the state’s “search bar”. It is inference astatine standard and changes the quality of the risk. Here, intentions are subjectively determined by an algorithm.
Two features marque this qualitatively antithetic from older surveillance debates. First, the spectre of bias. Algorithms bash not simply excavate information but reproduce distortions embedded successful the information they ingest and assertion that they are nonsubjective determinations based connected signifier recognition. If policing is already skewed by caste, religion oregon geography, analytics volition harden those inequities and cloak them successful an aura of objectivity. For the affluent, a mendacious affirmative is an administrative nuisance. For a young Muslim antheral successful a tiny town, already surviving nether a pall of suspicion, an automated “hit” tin trigger an ordeal and misidentification whitethorn transportation a humor price.
Second, the tyranny of scale. The information of modern analytics is not omniscience, but ubiquity. NATGRID reportedly classifies queries by sensitivity, and officials support that each entree is logged and justified. Without autarkic scrutiny, these are facial safeguards. When tens of thousands of requests are processed each month, logging risks becoming a clerical ritual peculiarly successful the lack of autonomous oversight, which is lacking adjacent astatine the level of Parliament.
The deficiency of people correction
Defenders volition autumn backmost connected the acquainted assertion that NATGRID is simply a substance of beingness and death. But is it truthful erstwhile it has drifted from counter-terror into mundane policing? Intelligence failures are seldom calved of information droughts alone. They are much often the products of organization weakness, perverse incentives and the rot of unaccountability — arsenic we learned successful 26/11 wherever the section constabulary had not conducted immoderate firearms grooming for implicit a year.
Tragically, a correction seems distant. Our law courts person lapsed into heavy slumber, allowing the expansive privateness doctrine successful Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Anr. vs. Union of India & Ors. (2017) to stitchery particulate portion the surveillance authorities expands. The legality of quality programmes that deficiency immoderate wide statutory instauration oregon meaningful oversight has not been squarely adjudicated, contempt aggregate pending cases. In spot of scrutiny, we person a martial nationalist temper fanned by governmental rhetoric and taste moulding, including mainstream cinema, that treats questioning the information constitution arsenic heresy. The effect is simply a adjacent soundlessness astir accountability for acts of coercion specified arsenic the New Delhi bombing of November 10, 2025, and the heartbreaking nonaccomplishment of 15 lives. Is it impolite to inquire whether determination was an “intelligence failure” adjacent with NATGRID successful place?
The daze of 26/11 continues to haunt us, but we person mistaken the remedy. If we genuinely attraction astir prevention, we request nonrecreational probe insulated from governmental whims, transparency astir quality lapses, and oversight vested wrong the parliamentary and the judiciary. Without these, NATGRID is an architecture of suspicion, built successful the sanction of information and normalised done fear, but functioning successful the work of integer authoritarianism.
Apar Gupta is simply a lawyer and the laminitis manager of the Internet Freedom Foundation
