What's the point of information, like on Mumbai, if it can’t be accessed?
If the colossal intelligence failure over the Mumbai massacre highlighted the importance of information, conflicting reports of warnings received, passed on and not passed on confirm that India is a bottomless pit for lost data.
Our clerical tradition expends enormous time and energy on collecting information but without the backing of a tradition of follow-up action. Information is a commodity that is valued for itself. Fax messages from Grenada during Ronald Reagan’s 1983 invasion landed in a London warehouse instead of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In India, messages can reach the right destination with nobody being any the wiser.
File and forget has always been the guiding principle. At one time returning Indians had to declare the amount of foreign currency they had brought back. I remember the first such form on disembarking at Sassoon Dock nearly 50 years ago when I entered the princely sum of six pounds I had left after a bibulously enjoyable sea voyage. Customs noted down my fortune and stamped and returned the form to me..
Back in Calcutta, a friend who owned a shop in the New Market said I could sell the form for good money to any one of thousands of businessmen desperate to convert black into white. “All he does is write a zero or two, three or four zeroes after the six!” Lacking his enterprise, I put the form away with my prized pound notes. The Reserve Bank might demand both one day. “You think they have nothing better to do than go through old records?” my friend replied contemptuously. “You think the Bank even knows what information it gets?”
Recently, I was told that credit card payments made abroad are supposed to be totted up and reconciled with the permitted foreign exchange allowance. “You think they bother with such calculations?” It’s the same with ad hoc payments to a freelance worker. The tax people are informed of each payment and are supposed to check that the tax return shows them. Do they bother?
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Mumbai reflected this disregard for information. So many people noticed and reported suspicious movements; so many agencies had intelligence of Pakistani mischief. Some of the information was stored, some was shared but not efficiently. Admiral Sureesh Mehta, the navy chief, says he received no “actionable information”. That implies he did receive something but not something useful. One would imagine his curiosity would have been sufficiently whetted by what he did get to ask for more. But that’s another story.
India is the ultimate filing cabinet bursting with information no one ever draws on, no one can draw on, possibly no one even knows of. A friend tells me that the Akbar Hotel’s disused bathtubs are the repository of sodden (the taps leak!) External Affairs Ministry files. Many Calcutta thanas boast bundles of dusty papers rising in dirty piles to the ceiling. Cobwebs festoon them. Rats gnaw at them. Cockroaches scurry among them. Rain water drips on them. When I asked an officer-in-charge why he kept those unreadable papers, he replied he was not authorised to destroy files.
Land records are equally chaotic. That’s why Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s promise to give Tata only land that produces a single crop provoked laughter. India — West Bengal rather — has no Domesday Book where information about crops is meticulously preserved for posterity. Even ownership records often become inaccessible after a time.
Computers are not necessarily an improvement. The same bank keeps sending me one computer-generated KYC letter that doesn’t require a signature after another. It should know this particular customer inside out by now but my replies must be piling up unread somewhere.
It’s like that form I signed at Sassoon Dock all those years ago. Dog-eared and increasingly yellow, it lay about the house for many years until it disintegrated or was lost or used as scrap paper. But I was convinced for a long time that Big Brother would suddenly pounce on me to demand why those six pounds hadn’t been surrendered. No one has done so yet. It’s another lost detail in a land where information is a blind alley.
India’s plethora of security organisations need more than modern information-collecting equipment. They need scientific storage facilities, the ability to analyse and interpret what comes in, and the means of easy classification and ready retrieval. Ultimately, effectiveness depends not on information alone but on what professionals call “humanint”. The ability to use information instead of sweeping it under the mat to save themselves trouble is more important than gathering it.