Mr Koichiro Koide
Japanese technology major NEC is in talks with Indian government and state-run companies to set up a state-of-the-art academy for enhancing cyber-security in the country. Such is the seriousness of the proposal that NEC will even consider taking equity in academy type collaboration through the public-private partnership projects and other similar ventures. NEC will like the proposed academy to take a formal shape by end of this year.
“Since the beginning of this year, we have initiated discussions for high level collaboration in cyber-security and development of safe-city capabilities in India,” Koichiro Koide, managing director of NEC India said.
NEC’s plans and proposals are timely because cyber-security is one of the strategic collaborations being worked upon at the government-to-government level between India and Japan. NEC, as a leading private sector company in the field of cyber security, has worked out concepts in tandem with such collaborations.
Mr Koide said the first likely collaboration with the central government for an academy or laboratory-type set up would be around the national capital region of Delhi, following which several such initiatives across the country would be worked out. He said this is all the more necessary because each city is different in characteristics and require its own unique concept to develop public safety.
A case in point is NEC introducing Surat’s city police to ‘face recognition’ technology in February. The company will now offer additional technology-based expertise such as automatic finger printing to Indian cities for making them safer and controlling the crime rate, Mr Koide added.
He highlighted the ever-menacing presence of terrorism related threats in India amid its fast expanding and booming e-governance, e-commerce and internet networks. Cities will also need to improve their existing levels of public safety, given that India has suffered from some of the worst terrorist attacks in world history including the November 2008 Mumbai tragedy.
Delhi and Mumbai are now ranked 42 and 44 respectively in the February Economist Safe City rating. Koide said there was a serious concern among the people about the safety level in Indian cities.
FROM SMART CITIES TO SAFE CITIES
He stressed on the need to build capacities and capabilities in the form of hardware, software and manpower in India.
“We have the concepts for cyber-security and safe-city, but we need the Indian government’s permission to proceed with building up these resources,” said Mr Koide.
There was an urgent need for the Indian government to develop resources in cyber-security, he stressed, adding that it is an urgent national requirement for the prospering Indian economy which will become even more prone to attacks by terrorists and other elements who are jealous of the country’s growth and progress.
He pointed out that the Indian government recently announced the requirement of 500,000 resources for cyber-security. As of now only 10 per cent of these resources were available, according to Koide’s estimates.
Though NEC is widely known as an information technology provider and telecom-infrastructure player in India but it has also chalked out plans and concepts of safe-city for India’s proposed 100 smart cities.
Smart cities will have centralized functions covering energy, water management, transportation network and other utilities.
Undesirable disruption of any of the functions of the smart cities would result in loss to the economy, an abysmal drop in reputation among investors and in a worst case scenario, loss of lives, said Mr Koide.
To avoid such a situation, the NEC’s concept of safe-city includes critical infrastructure management, inter-agency collaboration, law enforcement and information management.
fii-news.com
