The Director General of Police, Muktesh Chander has reacted to Herald’s Sunday Review expose on how porous Goa’s borders are, by saying that checks are conducted only when there is specific information. He actually needs to go and see for himself, as Herald did, that he actually has a serious problem at hand.
The CCTV cameras in Mollem, Pollem and Pernem are either non-functional or they do not record. In each of the posts, where Herald asked for recorded footage, different excuses were given for not being able to provide the same. In two of the three check posts, the sole custodian was an unarmed home guard. In Pernem there was not a soul on the road, while in Mollem, the senior most policeman on duty was having a bath on a hot day while the check post was left unattended.
While the DGP may not agree with and be even a tad irritated with this kind of an unannounced scrutiny by Herald, it will be well worth his time to figure how his men guarding the border can do so without a single weapon. His force on the spot merrily told Team Herald, that weapons are given to them during drills and other exercises and then taken back. So do we indeed have a border force which is given weapons to train against infiltration but has none when infiltration actually happens?
Everything from drugs to weapons to explosives can be moved into Goa, or perhaps out of it from these land routes.
This also has other serious implications. The high-level security at Goa’s airport, or at any airport for that matter, is meaningless, since smugglers or terrorists have the easy land route to go about their business.
He perhaps has a point when he says checking each and every vehicle will lead to a traffic chaos. But then his cameras need to watch each and every vehicle and record the visuals, and he needs to have men in position to see each vehicle pass by and look for any suspicious behaviour. And his men need to have some weapons, if a situation of confrontation rises.
Comparing Goa with any other state cannot be a professional approach towards looking at border vulnerability. Our Coast Guard and the river police are short-staffed and ill-prepared to ward off a sea threat and we have unguarded state borders through which anyone can pass through. Meanwhile the threat perception of an attack on Goa continues with several updated reports suggesting that the danger cannot be scaled down.The response to these inputs is not at par with the gravity of these threats.
For Herald, it was absolutely alarming that two of our teams passed through these borders with toy guns, talcuim powder and rocks, which could easily have been real weapons, drug powder and explosives. Herald however welcomes the DGP stating that he would review border security. But this exercise cannot be cursory. There needs to be a compete redefinition of border security and a surgical overhaul is needed, and not simple tweaking.
