Here's why there is a need for cyber security for the Digital India campaign

With around Rs 4.5 trillion of investment, PM Modi’s ‘Digital India Campaign’ is all set to be one of the grandest initiatives to push digitalization in the country. This campaign aims at creating digital awareness and empowering Indians to excel at infrastructure development, governance, manufacturing, electronic services and more. The PM wants to leverage technology to drive the nation and bring in transparency within governance and simplify citizens’ access to public services. The project includes creation of ICT infrastructure like high-speed Internet at Gram Panchayat level, on-demand availability of government services like health, education etc., and digital empowerment of citizens, especially through digital literacy.

With the start of this behemoth of an initiative, it is important to understand its scope and how security is going to be an inseparable part of the campaign.

Why Digital India?

About a third of India’s 252 million internet users, and a fourth of mobile internet users, are in rural areas. But internet penetration in villages, at 8.6 per cent compared to 37.4 per cent in cities, has a long way to go, and this is the statistic ‘Digital India’ hopes to change. As per a World Bank report, a 10 per cent increase in a country’s broadband connections leads to a 1.38 per cent rise in its gross domestic product.

Government Grand Vision

Our government has emphasized on the need of leveraging technology to drive the nation and bringing in transparency within governance and simplifying citizens’ access to public services. The vision of building ‘one hundred smart cities’ – which has been allocated Rs 7,060 crore – is a major project that would rely strongly on technology, calling for a robust cloud computing backend coupled with real-time surveillance and big data analytics technologies.

The Digital India programme will be implemented in phases from the current year until 2018. The vision of the government under the project includes creation of ICT infrastructure like high-speed Internet at gram panchayat level, on-demand availability of government services like health, education etc., and digital empowerment of citizens, especially through digital literacy. Under the programme, the government will train one person in each household digitally through ICT training to 10 lakh people with an outlay of Rs 376 crores.

Impact on overall economy

Analysts feel ‘Digital India’ has the potential to be one of most transformative programmes in recent times. Digital India Initiatives would provide the much-needed impetus to the economic growth given its focus on key social and industry sectors. Not only IT/ITeS, telecom, electronics manufacturing sectors would be benefited from Digital India, but we would see positive impact on other industry sectors as well, like Power Sector, Banking, and Financial Services.

Implementation & Monitoring Strategy

Digital India Advisory Group (DIAG) would be created, which will be headed by Minister of Communications to supervise the implementation of the programme, advice the government on policy issues and strategic interventions necessary for accelerating the implementation of Digital India Programme across Central and State government ministries/departments. The government will appoint nodal officers at key ministries to ensure smooth implementation of ‘Rs. 1 lakh crore ‘Digital India’ programme. The new posts of ‘Chief Information Officers’ (CIO) would be created in at least 10 key ministries to supervise the implementation.

Digital India Initiatives & Need of Cyber Security

We have already discussed about the alarming rise of cybercrimes in India and government’s continuous struggle to cope up with the latest trends of attacks. Apart from domestic cyber threats, India also faces tough cyber-attacks from countries including Pakistan, China, UAE, US, Turkey, Brazil, Bangladesh, Algeria and nations in Europe.

As per the statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau and other sources:

• 1,791 cases were registered in 2011, which grew to 2,876 cases in 2012 and to 4,356 cases by 2013.
• Hacking formed close to 60 per cent of all cyber offences.
• 58 per cent attacks are for financial gains and 42 per cent by foreign governments
• 155 .GOV and .NIC domains were hacked last year
• 32,323 public Indian website were hacked in 2014 with 14 per cent Y-o-Y increase

To counter this alarming situation, Indian Government has aimed to step up cyber security measures under Digital India programme starting with a Rs. 800-crore center that will help people check and clean their computer system from viruses and other malwares. The programme is intending to build capability to tell you that not only can track the malwares in computer system but will clean that infection as well.

A year in the works, the National Cyber Security and Coordination Centre (NCSC) will analyze Internet traffic data scanned and integrated from various gateway routers at a centralized location. It will facilitate real-time assessment of cyber-security threats and generate actionable reports for various agencies.

As a multi-agency body under the Department of Electronics and IT, the NCSC will include the National Security Council Secretariat, the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), the three armed forces and the Department of Telecommunications. It is expected to subsume the work done by CERT-In as well as issue alerts in the event of a cyber-attack.

(The author of the article, Ashish Tandon, is the Chairman and CEO of Indusface)