Govt, industry to spend about Rs 500 cr on cyber training

The government and the industry will spend about Rs 500 crore for creating workforce of 5 lakh professionals skilled in cyber security domain in the next five years, a senior government official said today.

“It can’t be only government led programme. Some part of the budget will come from government, some from industry. The overall budget is going to be about Rs 500 crore and at the end of fifth year we will have 500,000 cyber security experts,” CERT—In Director General Gulshan Rai said at an event here.

He was referring to government’s target envisaged under the National Cyber Security Policy, 2013, while inaugurating a cybersecurity education and research centre at the institute.

Rai said that very few institutes in the country are working on strategic and emerging area where there are cyber security concerns like mobile, operating system and there is lack of talent to work on security related work.

“There was a test on security code and only 21 per cent graduate engineers were able to clear test. About 79 per cent could not pass security code test. We need to move up from this level,” Rai said.

CERT—In DG said that cyber attacks have now gone at war level and things are becoming more complicated as we integrate more of software in modern weapons.

IIIT—D Director Pankaj Jalote said that the institute has started partnering with industry and through the new centre will work out on programs to train people from industry and government.

“From today onward we have facility in place. Now we will look at utilising for conducting outreach and research program. We current have intake of 170 students at graduation level, 121 at postgraduate and about 20 PhD levels. They all will contribute to work from this centre,” Jalote said.