Country
India
A bifurcated intelligence community with the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) for foreign intelligence and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) for domestic security, plus parallel military and signals services.
The Republic of India's intelligence community is structured around two principal services and several specialised parallel agencies. The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), formally a directorate of the Cabinet Secretariat, is the foreign intelligence service, established in 1968 by separation from the Intelligence Bureau in the aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) is the domestic security service, with origins in the 1887 Central Special Branch and operating since Independence under the Ministry of Home Affairs. The National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), established in 2004, is the principal technical-collection agency. The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA, no relation to the US service) is the unified military-intelligence body.
India's intelligence services have been substantially shaped by the country's bilateral relationships with Pakistan and China — including the four India-Pakistan wars (1947–48, 1965, 1971, 1999 Kargil), the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the post-1989 Kashmir insurgency, and the post-2008 reorientation following the Mumbai attacks. The post-2014 Modi government has overseen substantial expansion of intelligence capability, including the development of offensive cyber capacity. The Indian intelligence services operate under a comparatively limited public-record oversight regime; calls for an Indian intelligence-services law have been periodic but have not produced statutory enactment.
Intelligence Bureau
India's domestic security service, with origins in the 1887 Central Special Branch of the British Indian Government and one of the world's longest continuously operating intelligence services.
Research and Analysis Wing
India's principal foreign intelligence service, established in 1968 by separation from the Intelligence Bureau in the aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War and the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War.
How to read a country page
This is the institutional landscape of India's intelligence apparatus as it is documented in the public record. Each card above links through to a full agency profile — the service's founding date, statutory basis, jurisdiction, parent ministry, headquarters, official channels, and a structured account of role, history, and notable operations footnoted to primary sources. The agencies on this page may overlap institutionally (a foreign-intelligence service and a signals-intelligence service often share missions and personnel) and may operate against one another in counter-intelligence terms; the country page does not impose a hierarchy among them, only an inventory.
If a particular operation or scandal is what you are looking for rather than the institutional background, see the Dossiers — long-form pieces that cross agencies and countries. The methodology page documents how operations are categorised as confirmed, alleged, or disputed, and what the public record can and cannot tell us. The Lexicon defines the terms that recur across these pages — HUMINT, SIGINT, covert action, plausible deniability, station, asset, finding.
Coverage here grows as new declassifications expand what can responsibly be said about services that remain partly closed. Some agencies have full reference entries; others are stub entries pending the full treatment. Stubs are kept on the index so navigation between related services is preserved while the detailed text is written.