The Centre is mulling changes in the format of Chief Ministers' annual conference on internal security and make it sector specific to deal with major issues in a precise and problem resolving manner.
A senior official said the proposal to make the conference sector specific has come from the Prime Minister's Office but is yet to be firmed up.
Besides the already existing format of Naxal affected sates where chief ministers of nine states discuss the issue separately with PM, union home minister along with the key security officers of the Centre and states, the PMO wants to have at least four more sector-specific small conferences on - terrorism and religious radicalisation, border issues, northeast states and urban mega city policing to be included in the format.
To put to practice, the new format would require the nod of the union home minister Rajnath Singh who would do so after discussing it with the Intelligence Bureau, senior home ministry officials and other security agencies.
Besides, the Union home ministry would also need to assess how soon such a mechanism can be put in place and how the 29 states and seven union territories are to be divided sector-wise.
In the existing format, all the CMs and governors from the UTs are invited by the union home ministry for the day-long conference where burning security issues, besides a dedicated topic, are discussed.
"The proposal has merit as usually the annual CM's conference turns into a cacophony because of so many diverse issues and opinions are to be covered in a day's conference. Sectoral meetings will make it possible to have specific result oriented debates and concrete outcomes as only the affected states will be part of respective conferences," said the official.
But according to some officials, PM Modi has thought of the new format to make the decision making for the Central government much easier.
"Apparently, he understood as Gujarat CM, how tough it was for the previous UPA to handle all the states together especially on vexed issues like National counter terrorism centre ( NCTC) against which he himself had fought hard. But as he now is on this side of the fence he wants to find ways to make the dissensions less noisy and manageable in smaller sets of states," said another official.
In his last year's address as chief minister of Gujarat, Modi has had dubbed the daylong conference as useless.
"I cannot restrain myself from wondering about the usefulness of meetings such as this, in the absence of any concrete, time-bound follow-up action emerging from them... Meetings and conferences such as these play a critical role in our coming together as a nation to chart the way forward.... They must also be prevented from getting reduced to annual rituals, to be gone through for the sake of formality," Modi had said in his speech.
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