With growing need for security and safety of public from war, terrorist activities and anti-social activities, it has become very important to design and develop in-house skills for the detection of various analytes such as explosives, chemical and biological warfare agents and substance abuse. Currently in India, only canines are the best working explosive detection systems. In case of landmines, metal detectors are used extensively along with the canines. However due to the nature of the battlefield, presence of metal (exploded shells, scraps, etc.) has become so common that metal detectors are not effective in detecting landmines. Also, application of plastic containers makes these metal detectors further redundant. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop more sophisticated detectors which can work for all types of explosives. The devices used for this purpose should be rugged, easy to use by semi-skilled person, minimum false positives, be fully automatic, be battery operated and handheld among other parameters. Apart from this, it will be advantageous to develop a platform technology that can be extended further for the detection of chemical and biological warfare agents too

In this direction, IITB and Bigtec have collaborated and developed handheld explosive detectors for   detection of various explosives such as TNT, RDX, PETN, ammonium nitrate, peroxides and notromethane at sub PPT level. In principle, these devices can be modified further to explore possibility for detection of chemical and biological warfare agents, substance abuse, etc.