In a sign that high-tech terrorism has left Indian police in a bygone era, the Mumbai militants carried sophisticated equipment including global positioning systems (GPS) and satellite telephones, experts said.

By contrast, police at some of the locations attacked were armed only with bamboo sticks and lacked even mobile phones.

Most police did not have bullet-proof vests and some carried decades-old .303 Lee-Enfield rifles, said Praveen Swami, an author who specialises in policing and security issues.

"None of this is rocket-science technology -- who doesn't have a mobile phone these days?" he said.

"The problem is that the Mumbai police are grossly under-equipped and under-trained, as are most Indian police forces."

Ten Islamist extremists attacked about a dozen locations, taking hundreds of hostages at two hotels and a Jewish centre.

Mumbai officials said 172 people were killed and 296 injured in the 60 hours it took for security services to regain control.

India has been joined by the US in blaming the Pakistan-based Islamist movement Laskhar-e-Taiba for training and equipping the militants.

CCTV footage from Mumbai's main railway terminal, where more than 50 people were killed in the November 26 attacks, show unarmed railway police ducking in doorways as two gunmen sprayed the cavernous hall with bullets.

The militants carried automatic weapons, grenades, explosives and enough ammunition, city officials said, to kill 5,000 people.

They also had Thuraya satellite phones -- commonly used by Islamic militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, Swami said -- and satellite maps and videos of their targets, including a floor plan of the Taj Mahal hotel.

The police lacked basic knowledge of the layout of the buildings under siege, said Ajai Sahni, executive director of New Delhi's Institute for Conflict Management.

When their phone batteries ran low, the gunmen used those of the hostages to stay in contact with their controllers in Pakistan, calling them on Internet-protocol phone lines, which are difficult to trace, he said.

The militants arrived by boat from the Pakistani port of Karachi, using a portable GPS system. Their bags were later found to contain CDs with satellite maps of the city and footage of their targets, he said.

Indian security forces have been severely criticised for the way they handled the crisis, with agencies acting in isolation for want of a central command post.

The Times of India said Mumbai authorities had acquired just 577 new weapons for its security forces in the past six years, but as the city has no firing range, many officers had not fired a bullet for 10 years.

Police on Wednesday -- one week after the attack -- found a stash of explosives they said was left at Mumbai's station by the militants.

On the same day, the railways lost their 18 sniffer dogs because the private company providing them has not been paid for four months, newspapers said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said elite security services, including the National Security Guard (NSG) whose commandos played a high-profile role in what was dubbed Operation Tornado, would be expanded and upgraded.

The DNA newspaper said on Wednesday the NSG would receive GPS devices containing detailed road maps.

Sahni said night-vision goggles, thermal-imaging and heat-seeking equipment for locating human activity were basic tools elsewhere in the world.

"You can virtually look into buildings today, but our police don't even have guns, let alone maps," he said.

The experts criticised a plan to create a national security force, saying that basic policing needed rebuilding from the ground up.

"There is no way of getting around the fact that you need the local forces, which have the local knowledge and are always the first on the scene, to be trained and equipped for timely response," said Swami.

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