Will NIA be any different from CBI ..

As I read this news related to a reply by The Home Minister in Lok Shabha, to a common person like me it appears that NIA is probably going to be same as CBI

Just as a co-incidence NIA is also under central Home Ministry (as CBI)

Even as he reiterated that NIA would take up terror cases referred to it by the state governments and only exercise its suo motu powers under exceptional circumstances

NIA will work on cases referred to it by State Govt (as CBI .. gradually it may become a tool to cool off the political hot potato’s in the state as it usually happens in the cases referred to CBI)

To a query whether Naxal attacks would be investigated by NIA as well, Mr Chidambaram said it may not be so with most extremism-related cases as the agency was expected to take over only the gravest offences.

So one of the biggest slow death crimes faced by big part of our country will still remain out of the ambits of any central agency and will still get entrusted to state Police & CIDs who hardly have resources or equipments to tackle such organized crimes. They will continue to be treated as local problems rather than getting a unified view.

What probably no one is keen to put in public domain is what was identified as missing link in so many existing agencies that actually necessitated formation of another agency.

Other countries have created unified commands and better mechanism to decipher the information received from so many different links and put them in use.

Probably we can put on bets that in its current Avatar it will turn out to be yet another something very similar to CBI.

Afterthought: it will probably turn out to be another place to reward 'chosen' officers as i fear in the name of secrecy the NIA budget will remain unaccountable (out of the preview of general audits .. albeit small amount of 10 cr as allocated in this year's budget compared to what we have for RAW which runs into 1000 crs) and by definition NIA (as suggested by our HM) remains a reactive agency. I thought one of the key things came out from Mumbai attack was that we need 'pro-active' monitoring and decoding all the information coming out from various sources.. So probably its creation was again just to shift public focus and make them feel as if Govt is doing something.