Intelligence agencies of India are not governed by any legal framework and parliamentary oversight. Legal experts in India have been stressing upon existence of such parliamentary scrutiny for intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies of India for long. In fact, intelligence infrastructure of India is in big mess.However, for one reason or other, Indian government has ignored this much required constitutional mandate. Now the problem has taken a serious dimension, so our Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh found the situation alarming. He has commissioned a new law to be drafted that would make India’s intelligence agencies accountable to the parliament.
According to Praveen Dalal, the leading techno legal expert of India and a Supreme Court lawyer, till now we have no laws that govern the functioning of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Intelligence Agencies of India, etc. The draft Central Bureau of Investigation Act 2010 has proposed a law for CBI and the draft Intelligence Services (Powers and Regulations) Bill, 2011 has been suggested for Intelligence Agencies of India.
Since the PM has commissioned a new law to be drafted for intelligence agencies, it seems the proposed law would be independent of the recent proposed Bill 2011. It would be appropriate if techno legal issues are covered by the proposed law as suggested by our PM.
