The agency has decided to rope in private players to translate and interpret 23 Indian languages and dialects, including Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Urdu, Kashmiri and Marathi
India's apex anti-terror body, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), is facing a serious challenge in tracking, preventing and cracking cases. NIA's investigations into cases of terror, Left-wing extremism and fake currency have hit a language block in interrogation of accused arrested and interpretation of documents and literature seized during raids.
The agency has decided to rope in private players to translate and interpret 23 Indian languages and dialects, including Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Urdu, Kashmiri and Marathi.
The agency has also sought help in 40 foreign languages, including Polish, Norwegian, Kazak, French and Greek. In total, the agency has decided to rope in private players for help in 63 languages.
During investigations of terror funding cases, NIA faced problems interpreting accused's statements in Kashmiri and also during their interrogation as they were communicating in local languages. The agency also faced problems in cases related to extortion by National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang militants from individuals and organisations.
"NIA does not have a linguistically diverse staff so we are seeking help from private players. We first decided to seek help in foreign languages where our team members are not very efficient. Then we decided to go for both Indian and foreign languages," said a senior officer.
The officer said that NIA, which came into existence in January 2009 in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008, has taken up a total of 185 cases for investigation in the last nine years.
Out of these 185 cases, 64 pertain to 'jehadi' terrorism, 26 to terrorist acts by North East insurgents, 42 to terror financing and fake currency, 15 involving Left-wing extremism, while the remaining 38 cases relate to other miscellaneous terrorist acts and gangs.
These cases cover the entire spectrum of terrorism-related challenges which India faces, and have involved investigative efforts in 28 states and Union Territories.
In many cases, the agency faced language problems while communicating with arrested accused and going through documents seized from them. Temporarily, sleuths probing these cases, took help of local translators. But now NIA Director General Yogesh Chander Modi has decided to engage professionals as investigation in terror cases in not limited to India alone.
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