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In a technological leap, public sector Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL) has brought to the market an India made, third generation, Programmable Logic Controller. It will help in ensuring security of national infrastructure and finds applications across various industrial sectors.
Unveiling the product, Dr Anil Kakodkar, member, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), said “We need to build certain degree of protectionism for indigenous technology and products”. Several advanced countries do it for their national interest.
He made this remark in the context of the staggering import bill in electronics sector, that was close to surpassing the oil import bill. While oil imports are a concern on energy security, this huge import is a issue as far as security of Indian cyber space is concerned, Dr Kakodkar said.
India needs to ponder seriously over the ICT needs of strategically important domains. It is a question of huge investments, human capability building and developing indigenous technology.
“We cannot have short-term myopic economic logic ignoring national security issues,” Dr Kakodkar said, while talking to newspersons.
The Chairman and Managing Director of ECIL, Mr Y.S. Mayya, said key differentiators of the PLC compared to imported ones where it is home-grown are lower power consumption, economical, contemporary design, lots of safety features, built in obsolescence management and life time support guarantee.
“With safety and security as priority we have developed and launched the PLC. We will come up with micro versions soon. Even standard programming languages can be used and the nationwide network of servers of ECIL can deploy it,” he said.
The PLC market is dominated by international players. Most of these product are not amenable to Indian security systems. In the present network systems any security breach can be disastrous.
The indigenous, ECIL version assumes significance in this context. PLCs will be targeted for use in the strategic sectors to begin with. They also find application from dairies to nuclear reactors, roads to railways, process plants and across a wide range of industries that are automated.
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