Coming soon-Indian cyberspace: Secure bhi, private bhi

With the vision of a trillion-dollar digital component, accounting for one-fifth of the $5-trillion national economy, the importance of cyberspace in India would only keep growing as Indians have taken to mobile broadband like fish to water, driven by affordable tariffs, low-cost smartphones and a spurt in availability of audio-visual content in Indian languages.

However, all is not well with the cyberspace. Cybersecurity incidents observed by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) went up almost four times from 2017 to 2018, while cybercrimes went up by 77% from 2016 to 2017. Unsurprisingly, India’s global rank on the cybersecurity index slipped to 47 in 2018 from 23 in 2017, according to the UN agency ITU (International Telecommunication Union).