“Public private partnership is an important component of cyber security. This has been conceptualized through the establishment of the joint working group  with representatives from the concerned government departments as well as the representatives from the private sector. This group has already met about six times  and we hope to make some progress in this area,” said Gupta, while delivering his address at Cyber 2.0, organized by ASSOCHAM.

The JWG is working on a number of initiatives including the setting up of centres of excellence, information sharing and analysis centre and setting up of test labs in the country. “But as I said that we need to develop the right model for this PPP and we need greater participation of the private sector,” Gupta said.

Gupta stressed on the need for effective implementation of national cyber security policy that has been in the pipelines since 1991 but could only be officially formulated last year. “It has taken us almost till 2013 to come up with a cohesive document on cyber security. The cyber security policy is a coherent document and covers a lot of things. It is a good document. But the question is of implementation.”
Along with the national cyber security policy which was officially launched on 8th May 2013, a framework to strengthen the cyber security architecture in the country was also approved.

“Now this architecture has many components to it covers things like scanning the cyber space, incidence response. And these are at various stages of implementation. We will have to wait a little bit before all this comes together.”

In addition, the government is also taking steps to protect the national critical information infrastructure. A national critical information infrastructure   protection centre (NCIIPC) has already been notified in January 2014 under sections 17 A and 17 B of the IT Act. The centre has prepared the guidelines for protecting critical information infrastructure. “I think this will be a critical centre and a lot of concerns which were expressed here in terms of protection of critical infrastructure will be addressed by this centre,” Gupta said.

Gupta stated that the number of threats has increased incredibly over the years. In 2013, 71,000 cyber attack incidents were recorded. This year by October itself 62,000 incidents have already been recorded.

R K Mittal, DDG, department of telecommunications, said that telecommunication engineering centre (under telecommunications department) is drawing standards for mobile application and will unveil it within a month. 

Last year the government had announced the national policy on cyber security which underlined the importance of having a strong work force of 5,00,000 cyber security professionals in the next five years. The ASSOCHAM has proposed to set up the cyber security council of India under the National Skill Development Council (NSDC) in this regard.