Former RAW Chief Alok Joshi has been appointed as Senior Advisor to National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), a snooping agency mandated to gather technical intelligence.
A 1976-batch IPS officer of Haryana cadre, Joshi retired from Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the agency mandated to gather external intelligence, on December 31 last.
Earlier this week, Joshi was appointed as Senior Advisor to NTRO, official sources said.
He is expected to take over as Chairman of NTRO after the present incumbent Alahd G Apte demits office on March 31.
NTRO has been recently in news for allegedly passing on an intelligence input directly to the Coast Guard and Navy about a Pakistani boat. There have been conflicting reports on whether the occupants of the boat were terrorists or petty smugglers.
Joshi had served in Intelligence Bureau and Haryana Police with key operations relating to Nepal and Pakistan to his credit.
If Joshi takes over as the Chairman of NTRO, the IPS lobby will get back this post. The previous government had ended the monopoly of IPS by appointing former Telecom Secretary R Chandrasekhar as NTRO Chief. However, he did not join leading the then government to appoint Apte, a scientist at Baba Atomic Research Centre.
This was for the first time that a scientist had been appointed to head the organisation whose primary job was to carry out surveillance operations which included telephone tapping.
The IPS officers, along with sleuths of RAW Allied Services (RAS), had been on a war path with the scientist lobby to head the organisation.
NTRO, whose road map was drawn up by former President A P J Abdul Kalam during his tenure of Scientific Advisor to the government in 2001, is mainly tasked to prevent cyber threat and also provide and analyise technical intelligence.
It was set up in 2004 and was tasked to be a highly specialised technical intelligence-gathering agency expertise of which would be used by other intelligence agencies like IB, RAW and Military Intelligence.
