The gaps in our approach..

With an increasing number of freelance terrorists surfacing over the years,the worry among authorities is that they get to know ofthem only when an incident has occurred or is about to occur.In the cat-and-mouse chase between the law enforcer and terrorist, the freelance radical poses a serious policing challenge. In many ways, this new terror species is an effective option for terror operators to do the job from a distance, escaping notice while making an equal impact with lesser risk. This is important for the merchants of terror, who find it difficult to operate in an environment where every country is working to raise the cost of carrying out a terror attack by setting up specialised police forces backed by strong, arguably intrusive, anti-terror laws.
That's why, despite having a well-organised outfit like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in its control, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) needed a David Coleman Headley, very much a freelancer looking to do something spectacular, for scoping the 26/11 targets in Mumbai. And while Indian forces accounted for the last terrorist in Mumbai, it was Headley's arrest that eventually bared the plot.
It's this 'miss' that led to the creation of a Multi-Agency Centre (MAC) at the Intelligence Bureau headquarters for real-time intelligence sharing, forced India to revamp its immigration tracking system and work on overcoming obstacles posed by the federal character of law enforcement in the country.

With an increasing number of freelance radicals-turned-terrorists surfacing over the years, the worry among authorities is that they get to know of them only when an incident has occurred or is just about to occur. For instance, not until the Patna blasts did security agencies realise that a new offshoot of SIMI had emerged on the scene.
The policing challenge, therefore, is to find a way to intercept these attacks earlier. And that's where the focus has turned to over the past year or so, prompting a proactive approach to counter the radical before he becomes a terrorist. Some measures being taken to stop terrorism in the country:
-Internet monitoring and building a counter narrative
The aim here is to put out alternative material to jihadi propaganda, enter their chat rooms and counter ideological arguments while also tracing other participants. Agencies such as the National Technical Research Organisation, Computer Emergency Response Team and Department of Electronics and Information Technology are building capacity to populate cyberspace effectively for this purpose. Terror groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda are also up to the game, developing capabilities to deface government websites and hacking into their systems.
-Overcoming sovereignty hurdles
Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo are being convinced to set up their servers in India. One of the biggest hurdles that Indian investigators face in terror probes is that they have to rely on longdrawn legal processes such as obtaining letters rogatory (LR) from courts to get information from these companies whose head offices are located abroad. This is still a slow-moving exercise and the call now is to use diplomatic clout with like-minded foreign governments to obtain cooperation.
-Minority outreach

States are being asked to get their police organisations to develop stronger contacts within the minority communities. Intelligence agencies admit that their ground knowledge on this front has deteriorated and that's why confidence-building measures are being thought of. The first step in this direction is to not frame innocent Muslim youths in terror attacks. The National Investigation Agency (NIA), in particular, has been mindful of that, but gains can be frittered away if agencies are used for political purposes.
-Technology upgrade

Maintaining databases of suspects, their voice samples, ability to correlate information with agencies of friendly countries are the kind of upgrades in the pipeline. Home ministry officials say security agencies in the West are able to track profiles much faster because of more efficient and flexible database management like identifying individuals from just their voice in ISIS videos. In India, a Yasin Bhatkal kept Indian agencies at bay, carrying out attacks at will for over seven years.

-Reinventing beat policing

This is a subject that is getting considerable government attention with training being refocused on getting beat constables to develop personal relationships in neighbourhoods so that citizens volunteer information with ease. At a different level, an all-India phone number is being developed by the home ministry for citizens to call with information on terror.