New Delhi: The National Security Guard (NSG) will soon be procuring the latest technology to detect explosives planted by terrorists and anti-social elements, as the Union Home Ministry has invited comments from vendors and possible manufacturers to ensure market availability of such high-quality detectors.
A senior official in the Home Ministry told ETV Bharat that a Draft Qualitative Requirements (QRS) have been forwarded by NSG giving a timeline of 15 days to the vendors to come with the availability of such equipment.
The NSG has asked for the latest explosive detector technology like Ion Mobility Spectrometry (IMS) or Amplifying Fluorescent Polymer (AFP) or Mass Spectrometry (MS) or Micro Sensor.
As per the QRS floated by the Ministry, the detector should be able to detect explosives, explosive precursors (explosive with different chemical formulations as well as toxic chemicals).
"The detector should be at least 200 ppm or better for vapor and 50×10 grams or better for traces. The detector should be able to detect all types of organic and inorganic explosives in vapor, liquid, solid/powder, particle, and mixture form at varying temperature," the security agency said.
As far as detection range is concerned, the security agency said that the explosive trace and vapor detector shall detect the presence of small quantities of explosives by analyzing the explosives vapor available in the container or bag and outside in open bulk.
'NSG's quest for such a latest explosive detector assumes significance following the fact that in the recent past security agencies in the national capital detected high-quality explosives from different places.
As per a preliminary forensic examination, military-grade RDX was used in the IED, recovered from Seemapuri last week.
Similarly, RDX was also recovered from the Ghazipur flower market in January. Former director general of Border Security Force (BSF) Prakash Singh has hailed the initiative taken by NSG to introduce the latest explosive detection types of equipment in the force.
"We have seen what is happening nowadays. Terrorists are using highly improvised explosives to avoid detection from security agencies. It's very critical that our forces must introduce such sophisticated explosives detection equipment," said Singh.
He said that even the State police should also be equipped with such high-quality explosive detectors.
