Navin Kumar Singh Appointed India’s National Cybersecurity Coordinator

The Government of India has appointed Navin Kumar Singh, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, as the country’s fourth National Cybersecurity Coordinator, marking a significant milestone in India’s cyber governance framework. Singh succeeds Lt. Gen. M.U. Nair, who completed his tenure, and replaces interim coordinator Nath Gangavarapu. He becomes the first IPS officer to assume this critical national role.

Prior to this appointment, Singh served as Director General of the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIIPC), where he played a key role in strengthening India’s cyber resilience. During his tenure, NCIIPC conducted nationwide cyber war-gaming exercises to test the resilience of IT and operational technology (OT) systems across critical sectors such as energy, telecommunications, and banking. He also oversaw the finalisation of India’s updated National Cybersecurity Strategy, aligning governance, incident response, and recovery mechanisms with an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Singh placed strong emphasis on talent development and indigenous capability building. Under his leadership, NCIIPC launched the NCIIPC–AICTE Pentathon 2024, a national cybersecurity challenge that exposed students to real-world vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT) scenarios while encouraging innovation in domestic cybersecurity solutions.

Earlier in his career, Singh served as the nodal officer for cybercrime in Jharkhand, where he helped design proactive cybercrime mitigation strategies and advanced the digitisation of policing. His efforts were recognised for improving inter-agency coordination and strengthening citizen-facing digital platforms.

As National Cybersecurity Coordinator, Singh is expected to focus on enhancing public–private collaboration, improving threat intelligence sharing, and strengthening resilience across critical sectors. He will also play a key role in advancing India’s cyber diplomacy and improving the country’s standing in global cyber power rankings, while ensuring effective coordination among CERT-In, MeitY, NSCS, and sectoral regulators.