India to train thousands more cyber cops

Training centres for thousands more cyber cops are planned in India as the country's IT industry tries to boost its security credentials.

President of Indian IT industry group Nasscom, Som Mittal, said the association plans to open a further six cyber labs to provide technology training for police in places such as Calcutta and Delhi, and 220,000 tech employees have already signed up for the National Skills Registry (NSR) - India's background check database.

Cyber labs in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune have already trained up 4,000 police officers in tech crime since they were set up about four-and-a-half years ago.

Mittal said that with large outsourcers employing about 60,000 people Nasscom was continuing to push employers to put pressure on workers to sign up to the NSR - which allows background and ID checks linked to fingerprints.

Special Report: Inside India

In February 2007 silicon.com's Steve Ranger visited the Indian tech hotspots of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune. Click on the links below to see photo galleries of the cities and companies visited.

♦ Satyam's IT campus
♦ Hyderabad's tech parks
♦ Bringing tech to rural India
♦ High-tech on the streets of Pune
♦ Pune - the new Bangalore?
♦ Boom town Bangalore
♦ Bangalore's Electronics City
♦ SAP and Wipro in Bangalore

The growing confidence in outsourcing to provide data security marks a shift in perception from a survey by analysts Gartner in 2005 that found security and privacy were once of the biggest fears among companies considering outsourcing.

Mittal told silicon.com that outsourcing companies were able to implement higher standards of data security because they could easily set up rigorous new procedures, could invest more in policies using revenues from multiple contracts, had experience of meeting high security demands from different companies and there was less resistance to security checks among staff.

He said: "We are putting together terms of best practice and sharing those answers to ensure that what we deliver in terms of service is as secure as possible."

He said the cyber lab training meant suspects were regularly being picked up for crimes such as intellectual property infringement.

Mittal said: "In yesteryear price and quality were very important criteria, today security practices are taken seriously by management as well."

Nasscom has also helped set up a cyber crime watchdog, the Data Security Council of India, which is a self-regulatory member organisation.