The government has issued draft of proposed National Cyber Security Policy (NCSP) that identifies indigenous development of IT products essential for curbing threats from imported hi-tech products.

"Indigenous research and development is an essential component of national information security measures due to various reasons -- a major one being export restrictions on sophisticated products by advanced countries," the NCSP draft said.

"Second major reason for undertaking R&D is to build confidence that an imported IT security product itself does not turn out to be a veiled security threat," it said.

The draft has asked government to identify the most dangerous classes of cyber security threats to the nation, critical IT infrastructure vulnerabilities and the cyber security problems and use these findings to develop and implement a coordinated R&D effort focused on the key research needs.

The draft has even identified proprietary technologies at risk and asked for promotion of products that are based on open standard in the country.

"To minimise the risk of dependency on proprietary IT products, open standards need to be encouraged. A consortium of government and private sector needs to be created for enhancing the use of validated and certified IT products based on open standards," the draft states.

The draft has proposed creating a nationwide intranet for connecting strategic installations in the country and make National Cyber Response Centre - Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) nodal center to monitor this intranet.

The Department of Information Technology (DIT) is nodal agency for NCS policy and it has invited comments on this draft policy by May 15.

The draft had been prepared by 12 key government departments. Some of these names are National Information Board (NIB), National Crisis Management Committee (NCMC), National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), Home ministry, Defence ministry and Department of Telecommunications.