Minister of State of Communications and Technology Sachin Pilot has said that more than any other Indo-US medium or long-term collaboration, including nuclear energy, what is most important today is collaboration between New Delhi and Washington in cyber security.
Speaking at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies -- a leading Washington think tank on the topic titled, 'India and the US: Partners in a Tech-Driven World,' Pilot said that while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama have talked about Indo-US collaborations in a plethora of sectors from aerospace to agriculture and earth sciences to nuclear energy, which are all medium to long-term collaborations, "what's more important is to collaborate on issues that concern us immediately."
And, of immediate concern to both countries, the junior minister said, "is cyber-security".
Pilot noted that 'the kind of damage that entities and groups and people can cause through the Internet and through the cyber-world is somehow disproportionate to their conventional capacities'.
Thus, he argued: "In order to mitigate those threats, we have to do a lot of learning from each other and see how we can best legislate, best execute and therein somehow limit the damage that can potentially be caused."
"We have to understand that it is in the best interest of our government, of our industry --I am talking about India now -- to secure this space as much as possible," he said.
Pilot explained that last October, a new law had been put in place 'which really gave teeth and we really studied the legislation from Europe, from America, from other countries, to see how they have tackled some of their issues relating to cyber-crime and date privacy, on-line fraud, things of that nature'.
He said, "A comprehensive legislation is now in place and we set up a tribunal, because the conventional law and the Indian penal code and the Indian judicial system was perhaps not equipped to handle these kinds of challenges."
Pilot added that this comprehensive law talks about how "we can curtail and have severe punishments for things such as child pornography. There is a huge scope of the Act, which talks about how we have to make sure that we have enough safeguards and firewalls within the Net space so that it becomes safe not just for individuals to operate on the Indian net-space, but also for companies."
"Indian companies have global clients," he declared. "So, it is very important for us to ensure that there is a sense of confidence in such large global clients -- that Indian companies have the capacity, have the backing of the government and the laws to make sure that data privacy is guaranteed as best as possible."
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