New Delhi: Government has handed over the exercise of conducting a threat assessment and security analysis of all the 16 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Delhi's premier medical institute AIIMS to central security force CISF.
The decision has been taken by the Union Home Ministry keeping in mind the vulnerability of these vital institutions and after witnessing the increasing reliance of important service sectors of the country on CISF consultancy to secure their businesses and large workforce against potential security threats like terror attacks and similar breaches, official sources said.
All the 16 IITs located in Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur, Chennai, Kharagpur, Guwahati, Indore, Roorkee, Varanasi, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Patna, Bhubaneswar, Ropar, Gandhinagar and Mandi and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) campus in Delhi have been brought under the "institutional and uniform" security processes as outlined by the central force which has a centre of excellence in this regard.
Experts and officers of the force will travel to all these locations in the coming days to chalk out a fool-proof security apparatus for these facilities which will be guarded by their own staff.
Latest records show India Inc. has been increasingly investing in professional anti-terror consultancy provided by CISF, with such demands from the business sector witnessing a six-time since the last year.
The Central Industrial Security Force, the elite force mandated to guard vital installations like airports, nuclear and aerospace facilities across the country, has registered a quantum jump as it earned over Rs. 2.64 crore in 2014 and the first four months of this year.
This is more than seven-times jump in terms of money earned by CISF for rendering these services as compared to 2013.
The force has recently prepared a new blueprint to provide an aggressive and smart security-related knowledge to these institutions with CISF Director General Arvind Ranjan personally monitoring each of these cases.
Ranjan confirmed to PTI that the force is getting more and more requests in this regard as it is the best pool of knowledge and resource in this domain since consultancy services were launched in 2001.
