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Facing tremendous pressure from the future Prime
Minister of India, the Department of Telecom (DoT) of India has
marked the priority areas. Surprisingly, these areas are the same
that have been deliberately avoided and ignored by DoT for so many
years. Is this adoption of double standards on the part of DoT
or a sincere effort to remove the inadequacies of Indian telecom
sector is still to be seen.
The present working and policy decisions of the DoT
have put the cyber security of India in a precarious situation. There
are many cyber
security challenges that the Narendra Modi government
would be required to deal with simply because DoT and previous
government failed to take effective steps in this direction.
According to Praveen Dalal, managing partner of New
Delhi based ICT law firm Perry4Law
and leading techno legal expert of Asia, “Cyber Security of India
needs a “Ground Level Overhaul” as it has been ignored in India
for decades. Even on the legislation front, India has failed to do
the needful. For instance, we need to repeal the laws like
Information
Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act 2000), Indian
Telegraph Act, 1885, etc but for some strange reasons our
bureaucrats and Indian government kept them intact”.
“I have been suggesting these recourses for the
past five years but till now nothing concrete has happened in this
regard. Similarly, crucial laws are absent from Indian statute books.
These include law regarding privacy,
data
protection (PDF), telecom
security, encryption,
cloud
computing, etc, informs Dalal”.
Surprisingly, now DoT believes
that introduction of new laws and norms, including the communication
bill to replace century-old Indian Telegraph Act, security of
networks, and infrastructure must be the priority areas for the new
government. DoT has even listed top 10 priority areas for the sector
with the Cabinet Secretary. The Cabinet Secretary has asked all the
departments to keep a presentation ready for appraising the new Prime
Minister of achievements as well as failures of the outgoing
government and steps the departments would like to take in order to
boost the growth.
The DoT’s list include introduction of
Communication Bill that will replace over century old Indian
Telegraph Act, 1885, as well as Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act 1933,
TRAI Act 1997, Cable TV Network (Regulation) Act 1995, IT Act 2000,
official sources said. An internal committee of DoT has already
recommended providing telecom, cable and broadcasting services by a
single company and paying for the services though a common bill.
Apart from this, DoT has listed six major incomplete
projects, including Rs 20,000-crore National Optical Fibre Network
(NOFN) project aimed to provide high speed broadband services across
all 2.5 lakh panchayats in the country along with Wi-Fi services that
were started by the outgoing UPA government.
DoT has said that there is a need to further amend
telecom licences for facilitating growth”. There is a need to
separate network licensing from services licensing and ease barriers
to entry and exit for telecom players. The new government should work
on implementation of full Unified Licensing Regime”, an official
source said.
Amid growing cyber
espionage threat, DoT has listed security of communication
network in the agenda. The department said there is a need for
“comprehensive plan for telecom
security, including creation of testing facilities for
integrity of communications network”. At present, India does not
have any security testing
facility for telecom equipment to detect complex malware.
DoT has also listed need to strengthen mobile services in border
area, dedicated communication network for defence forces
as part of communication
security.
