Military options are never easy

The Mumbai attacks have served as a wake-up call and our political leaders appear to have stirred themselves out of their stupor to review the national security threats and challenges that the country faces.

The UAPA Amendment Bill and the creation of a National Investigation Agency are good first steps. Enhancing intelligence acquisition should now be the foremost priority. The solution lies in upgrading humint (human intelligence) capabilities by an order of magnitude, creating a suitable organisation to make intelligence assessments and fine-tuning India's counter-terrorism response to react quickly and effectively.

Simultaneously, counter-terrorism cooperation with friendly powers should be enhanced so as to benefit from a larger pool of knowledge and resources.

The intelligence agencies are cognisant of the existence of many sleeper cells across the country. A few of these terror modules have been eliminated in encounters in recent years. It is only by stepping up the deployment of humint resources and penetrating the control HQ of the sleeper modules -- a very complex intelligence operation -- that sufficient information about them can be acquired.

Thousands of well-qualified ex-servicemen retire at a young age (35 to 40 years) and go back to their villages every year. Many of them would be willing and eager to take up the challenge to be trained as agents of the Intelligence Bureau. The people of the country can also contribute to this national effort by maintaining vigilance and reporting all unusual activities to the authorities.

New police personnel and intelligence agents need to be recruited, armed, equipped, trained, housed and fed before they can join the work force. Surveillance devices like CCTVs and infrared monitors also need to be purchased and installed.

The ones that are already available need to be made serviceable. Coastal and border surveillance must be carefully coordinated. Meanwhile, the security of vulnerable areas must be ensured by calling for help from the central police and paramilitary forces, bearing in mind that some of these are also overstretched.

One action that all state governments can take right away is to withdraw the thousands of security personnel detailed for VIP security duties and re-deploy them at key locations that are more vulnerable than VIPs so that they can act as a deterrent.

On a larger plane, the Indian leadership must stop pretending that all of India's national security challenges are of external origin. Most of India's law and order problems like communal riots and agitations for increased reservations and quotas have been caused by vote bank politics and the extant politician-bureaucrat-police-criminal nexus.

The time has come to re-examine the merits and demerits of India's parliamentary democracy based on the Westminster model in which both the executive branch and the legislature are manned by the same people.

India's political leaders have failed to rise above self interest -- that is centred on elections and secret funds to win them -- and have therefore failed to provide good governance. They have failed both the Constitution and the people and it is time for change.

India needs its own Obama moment if the present rot that lies within is to be stemmed. If the Mumbai terror attacks serve to cause some introspection and act as a catalyst for change, the sacrifice of the lives of 200 innocent people and security forces personnel will not have been in vain.

Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (Retd)
Director
Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS)
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ICICI Prudential hires ESM

Mumbai-based private life insurer ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Co Ltd has started hiring former Servicemen as unit managers in rural areas, said a top company official here. Finding it difficult to get the required manpower, the company decided to tap the retired non-commissioned officers' segment, N.S. Kannan, executive director of the company, told the media here Thursday.

He said the company has signed an agreement with STRIVE (Skills, Training and Research in Vocational Education) to offer the former Servicemen six weeks' training and give the successful candidates a Certificate of Insurance Management (CIM). Kannan said retired armed forces personnel who are graduates and have completed ten years of service are eligible for enrolling into the CIM programme. All the successful candidates get jobs as unit managers.

The unit managers have to manage around 25 insurance agents and get paid a mix of salary and incentives based on sales. ICICI Prudential Life has hired about 230 retired army personnel under the scheme across the country, 48 percent of them belonging to southern India. 'Around three percent of our premium comes from rural areas,' Kannan said. Of its total 260,000 agents, around 30,000 are in the rural areas.

Capitalised heavily at Rs.33.62 billion, ICICI Prudential Life derives nearly 90 percent of its new premium from selling unit-linked insurance policies. However, the company's average premium per policy (APPP) is around Rs.20,000. Agreeing that it is comparatively lower than other competitors, Kannan said, 'Sixtythree percent of our new business is generated by individual agents and the balance is contributed by alternate channels comprising of banks, corporate agents and others, for other players, bancassurance partners fetch in bulk of their business.'

The company has four major banks- ICICI Bank, Federal Bank, Bank of India and South Indian Bank and 18 cooperative banks as its bancassurance partners. Bancassurance is the sale of insurance products through bank branches. Queried about the agency churn experienced by the company, Kannan said, 'Typically 75 percent of the agency force fades away four years after recruitment.' The large churn not only affects the insurer in terms of increased hiring costs but also the customers because they will not be serviced.

ICICI Prudential
Friday 22nd February, 2008