Poor intelligence keeps India vulnerable: analysts

NEW DELHI, July 14, 2011 (AFP) - India will remain a soft target for militant attacks until it enforces a radical shift in counter-terror policy that prioritises effective intelligence-gathering, analysts said Thursday.









"But India needs to realise that the acquisition of gadgets is not going to compensate for an ill-trained, semi-educated police force.

" Despite Home Minister P. Chidambaram's insistence that Wednesday's serial bomb blasts in Mumbai could not be blamed on any intelligence failure, experts said India's internal security apparatus remained woefully inadequate.

The three explosions in the country's commercial capital left 17 dead and 131 injured, dozens of them seriously.

Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute of Conflict Management in New Delhi, said new security measures introduced after the 2008 Mumbai attacks had only addressed "a fraction" of the core weaknesses in policing and grassroots information gathering.

"Obviously, you cannot have a 100 percent guarantee against a terror attack, but that said, we have tremendous infirmities in terms of security," Sahni told AFP.

"Our system does not respond on a war footing to terrorism, it acts like a confused bureaucracy," he