SANJAY SAHAY
Is gold smuggling rampant in this country? What are the known and well-established routes? What is the modus operandi which is used regularly? What is the nature of intelligence available against which the individual offenders, cartels and syndicates are mapped? What quantum of gold smuggling trade is done purely by solo individuals or very small unorganised groups? This leads to another question, what is the stranglehold of global gold smuggling syndicates on the whole trade? What percentage of this trade is managed through mules and small operators on their behalf?
Do We Have a Strategy to Tackle This Issue?
Not that one expects answers to all these questions, this would just provide us pointers, whether we know the problem, have a strategy and are working on it and expect some pre-defined results in the short, medium and long run. God forbid, if we are working on a case-to-case basis, though results will still keep coming, then one thing is for sure, we are not in the battle to effectively curb it, leaving aside even thinking of abolishing it in our imagination. The recent case of intercepted gold smuggling at Bangalore’s Kempegowda International Airport throws up some scary questions.
Is It Really Possible to Smuggle 14.8 kg of Gold Through Two International Airports?
Is it possible in today’s day and age to smuggle 14.8 kgs of gold on your body, navigating through two well-established international airports? Airports are operated and secured by multiple agencies, with their well-defined job description and scope of work and one would love to believe that it is a well-oiled machine with very little chances of discrepancy. But can it happen that movement of this nature does not raise even an iota of suspicion with any agency or any personnel deployed? Can the use of technology at two different levels be completely silenced?
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One is the physical level when you can get across stringent physical, frisking and technical controls, which are placed on the way to reaching the departure gate. Similarly, on your destination, immigration does not find anything amiss with nature and frequency of travel and the custom sleuths are not able to lay their hands given their discerning professional eye, supported by cameras and technical resources at their command. If you miss out on that, then why don’t we derive any analytics/intelligence out of video footage? Is this dead data? Then what about the various databases, are they data tombs? Does no actionable intelligence come out of it? Is there any interplay of databases of different connected airport security stakeholders for a common purpose? Metadata can provide another purposeful way to find actionable intelligence.
ARE WE COMFORTABLE WITH HUMAN EXPERTISE AND HIGH-END TECH FAILING SIMULTANEOUSLY IN OUR CRITICAL OPERATIONS?
(The writer is a former Karnataka cadre IPS officer, Founder & Director, TechConPro, Cyber Security Expert, Professional Public Speaker & Writer. Hailing from Palamu, Jharkhand, he lives in Bangalore.)
