Govt to soon set up cyber security operations centre: Ravi Shankar Prasad

With cyber security becoming critical in digital transformation of India, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad Thursday said government will soon set up a 'security operations centre' to monitor cyber incidents with regard to IT infrastructure and applications hosted by NIC.

"A government security operations centre will start soon. The issue of cyber security is extremely important," the Minister said addressing the National Meet on Grassroot Informatics organised by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) here.

The minister further said that a data centre for cloud would also be established in Bhopal. This would be in addition to four data centres located in Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhubaneshwar and Pune.

Inaugurating the three-day event, Prasad asked NIC's District Information Officers (DIOs) to take an "innovative and proactive" approach.

"NIC must adopt a transformative approach to make a difference at the grassroots level. I appeal to NIC to connect with the Common Service Centres, which have successfully provided training on digital payment systems to over 1.96 crore of rural citizens and 6.15 lakh merchants," he said.

The government plans to enhance the infrastructure of district NIC offices to international standards, he added.

As a pilot project, 150 District NIC offices would be upgraded during 2017-18, while rest will follow soon. He further instructed his Ministry to develop a training module for NIC officials to keep pace with the evolving technologies.

Prasad also announced the introduction of annual awards for the DIOs of the NIC for taking up exemplary innovative approach in their respective districts. The top three best innovators will get a reward of Rs 2,00,000, Rs 1,00,000 and Rs 50,000 respectively, he added.

Later in the day, while speaking at the Raisina Dialogue, the minister said that programs like Digital India, Make in India, Skill India, Start up India, Stand up India and Smart Cities were designed to fulfil a larger vision of making India a "technologically empowered society".