NEW DELHI, INDIA: While the Government of India is keen to deliver a number of services to its people by using information and communication technology (ICT) tools, it is highly worried about prevention of data that it would generate from cyber criminals, especially in China.

“We have proposed to impose heavy penalties for unauthorized access, impersonation, tampering and manipulating of Aadhar data and unlawful disclosure of the same. However, in the world of Internet, we have to be cautious from various threat arising, especially from outside of the nation,” said RS Sharma, director general and mission director, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), while speaking at a symposium organized by Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) here today.

“It is estimated that there are 40,000 professionals in China whose single purpose is to hack. We have to be cautious about it,” he warned.

CRIS, as part of CRIS Day celebrations, today organized symposium on implementation of information technology in government departments for sharing experience of IT implementation in railways.

This symposium started with the keynote address by Nandan Nilekani, chairperson, UIDAI, who expressed his concern of security and privacy that are being generated by government for providing government service to citizens.

“Public data should be standardized and there should be open architecture for building up application programming interface so that stakeholders should be able to analyze those data and build application. There should be open architecture for building up applications,” said Nilekani.

Nilekani expressed that open architecture may lead to security concern but the government needs to work on it and address security concerns. He added that the government needs to strike a balance between transparency and privacy.

“When technology is being used in public sector reform and public delivery then we have to have clear guidelines on security and privacy,” said Nilekani.

Dr Gulshan Rai, director general, Cert-In – the cell of the Government of India to deal with cyber security, acknowledged that government departments in India had been under threat from cyber criminals.

“In 2009, we experienced thousand of attacks. Out of all the attacks, 20 per cent of breaches detected were concerning government systems. There were 18 per cent attacks on financial system and 15 per cent attacks were on health care data,” said Rai.

Rai acknowledged that the detection of threats in infrastructure had been easy but threats arising from applications is difficult to detect and also methodology for detection is complex.

He mentioned that the Section 43A of Information Technology Act 2000 (amendment 2008) will be vetted in a week's time and will be open for public comments to cross check the aspects that may have been missed by the government.

Beside security concerns, Pradeep Gupta, chairman, CyberMedia Group, brought attention of the audience towards physically challenged citizens of the country who need more openness in government system and services.

“Government data has to be secure but at the same time government should also look at its responsibility towards its citizens, especially 6 per cent of physically challenged people in the country,” observed Pradeep Gupta.

“The services and data should be easily accessible by them as well, otherwise we will create a large divide in our society. This should be the area of strategic focus where we need to bridge the gap. The technology may look complicated but we have to tune it as per need of our society,” he added.