Greyhounds, the special anti-terrorist squad of the Andhra Pradesh police, is doing a commendable job, National Security Guard Director General Ranjit Shekhar Mooshahary said on Monday.
He told mediapersons in New Delhi that the Greyhounds were some of the best paid in the country.
Personnel of the NSG, mostly drawn from the army and state police forces, get 25% more than their normal pay, but in case of the Greyhounds it is 50% more, he said.
"The Greyhounds manual and its training course is of a very high standard. Only the best policemen of Andhra Pradesh are selected. I have watched them train and rate them very highly. They are not far behind the NSG," Mooshahary said. "Even their constables pay income tax," he added.
Facing threats from terrorists, several states are raising special anti-terrorist squads on the lines of the NSG. Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Orrisa have their own commando forces and their own training manuals, he said.
When asked about the Akshardham operation and the lessons learnt from it, he said: "The biggest lesson was that we must not lose our men."
NSG commando Subedar Suresh Chand was killed while flushing out terrorists from the temple in Gandhinagar, Gujarat while another commando Surjan Singh Bhandari is still in coma.
He said that it took the commandos quite some time to check every one of the 100 rooms in the Akshardham complex, which is spread over 25 acres.
"We could have used gas (to flush out the terrorists) but we decided against it. We decided to get at them and we got them," the NSG chief said.
He also said that an arrangement has been worked out with the police to ensure that in crisis situations, the NSG commandos are given the right of way, the lack of which resulted in the commandos getting stuck in a traffic jam some distance from their base camp during the Akshardham crisis.
He said it's not cost-effective to have NSG teams based in the south or any other part of India.
The NSG headquarters in Manesar, Haryana is hailed as a centre of excellence for training of personnel for VIP security and over 150 foreigners have undergone training there, he said.
The NSG training is so rigorous that around 40% of the personnel get weeded out in the training period resulting in a high rate of vacancy, he said. The NSG also interacts with other elite anti-terrorism commando forces, like Israel's, to maintain its high standards, he said.
He did not comment on reports about plans to assign VIP security to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police.
