Sci-war and cyber threats are the new forms of warfare today

Jayadeva Ranade, Cabinet Secretariat - RAW

We have a new kind of warfare in cyber space - sci-war, cyber threats and media. Our biggest challenge other than China is Pakistan. China has set aside $90 billion for expanding its footprint across the globe for propaganda and moulding the people’s mind. It is primarily including the cyber domain to extend its reach. 80% of the main service providers in our telecommunication industry are Chinese companies. Huawei and ZTE complete them and they today cover Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Maldives. It is their system that is operating there, whether it is a landline or a wifi. So, we need to really look at it and start thinking how we can set up either a parallel system or a system that in course of time will take over.

We say that we have a problem of manpower, but I can rightly point it out where this manpower is. All our best designers and developers are sitting abroad. We all are IT coolies who are living here. We are doing backend operations for all the large MNCs which indeed are very low end and we need to upgrade that. And the way to upgrade this is by starting cyber security, cyber training and cyber awareness.