CRIS Brainstorms for Innovation

On the eve of CRIS (Center for Railway Information Systems) day, it organized
a brainstorming symposium with industry and government to bring in further
innovation to ICT deployment in Indian Railways.

"There could not have been a better way to celebrate CRIS day when we had key
figures from the government and industry to celebrate with us and at the same
time, share their inputs for ICT deployment on a common platform," said SS
Mathur, GM, IT, Center for Railway Information Systems.

"We have proposed to impose heavy penalties for unauthorized access,
impersonation, tampering and manipulating Aadhar data and illegal disclosure of
the same. We have to be cautious about it," said RS Sharma, director general and
mission director, UIDAI.

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

"Open architecture may lead to security concerns, but the government needs to
strike a balance between transparency and privacy; and at the same time, we have
to make it secure," said Nilekani.

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

Dr Gulshan Rai, director general, CERT-Incell of the Indian government to
deal with cyber securityacknowledged that the Government of India has been
under continuous threats from cyber criminals.

"In 2009, we experienced thousands of attacks. 20% of breaches detected were
concerning the government systems. There were 18% attacks on the financial
systems and 15% attacks were on the healthcare data," said Rai.

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

Rai mentioned that section 43A of Information Technology Act 2000 (amendment
2008) which is applicable on corporates will be vetted in a weeks time and will
be open for public feedback.

Besides security concerns, Pradeep Gupta, chairman, CyberMedia Group brought
the attention of audience towards the physically challenged citizens of the
country who need more transparency and help regarding government systems and
services.

"Government data has to be secure, but government should also look at its
responsibility towards its citizens, especially 6% of the physically challenged
people in the country. The technology may look complicated, but we have to tune
it as per the needs of our society," said Gupta.

Prasoon Srivastava/CIOL

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