As New Delhi examines surveillance equipment offered by US companies to monitor infiltration, Israeli-made sensors lie embedded, abandoned and dysfunctional, along several stretches on the Indo-Pak border.In fact, Israeli vendors who have been holding negotiations with New Delhi for almost four years have been informed, after complicated trials, that their equipment is unsuitable for Indian conditions.Evidence for this lies in bulky files in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Border Security Force (BSF) which contain results of trials conducted with Magal, the Israeli manufacturer, in 1999-2000. After tests along 400-metre border stretches in Gurdaspur, Punjab and Samba, Jammu sector, the use of sensors was rejected as an unfeasible and exorbitant option.This was the precise feedback given to the MHA after the trials ended in July-August 2001: ‘‘Due to sarkanda grass and movement of large numbers of wild animals (neelgais and wild boars) the system gives several false alarms and gets defective mainly during monsoons. The equipment has not been found of much use. So far, only one detection was made.’’The Government paid Magal $325,000 for sensors and processor monitors to cover 5 km of the border and the following reasons were cited for the equipment’s unsuitability:• Processor monitors which are connected to the ground sensors via cables are too bulky.• Sensors, once dug 23 cm deep into the ground, could not be relocated or shifted.• Even four feet of water, which sometimes collects in the monsoon season, makes the sensor systems dysfunctional.Besides technical experts from the BSF, officials from Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) had also been called in during the Magal trials and they too reported the same problems: that the sensors emitted false alarms whenever a large animal crossed the border and that they developed defects during heavy rains or extreme heat.Officials say that the Israeli teams were asked to do some modifications based on the weight of the intruders but that, too, did not have the desired results.Indications that a major technological boost was in the offing for the J&K border has led to considerable excitement in the procurement units of the Army and para-military forces.Officials maintain, ideally, ground sensors should be used in combination with mobile sensors which can be shifted from one location to another, along with the conventional methods of monitoring via Border Observation Posts (BOPs) and wireless interception.US vendors offer a wide range of seismic acoustic, magnetic and infrared passive sensors which function well in extreme climate though it is to be recalled that even the sophisticated Remotely Monitored Batallion Sensor System (REMBASS) used by the US Army in Bosnia, triggered false alarms due to animal crossings when embeddded in wooded areas.The Indian Army, which imported some sensors for the Drass and Kargil sectors, earlier this week organised a demonstration of Israeli-made Elop Long Range Reconnaissance and Observation Systems (LORROS) for para-military forces. This equipment, sources say, comprises of a tripod and twin laser vision cameras to be used during the day and night and are being used by some infantry and artillery units.As part of the modernisation plan, the BSF has now received clearance for the import of a large number of thermal imagers, which, again, the Army has been using effectively in the J&K border.The imagers, unlike sensors, work on the principal of differing body temperatures and have been useful in the past for keeping a check on movement of infiltrators upto three kilometres deep into the border.
