Deccan Despatch (January - April 2010) - CII

Mr Ashish Sonal, Founder & CEO, Orkash Services Pvt LtdBy2050, city dwellers are expected to make up 70 percent of the earth’s total population, or 6.4 billion. A city is amicrocosm of the major challenges and opportunities facing the planet today. It is time to act because intelligenceis being infused into the way the world works. We now have the ability to measure, sense and monitor the condition ofalmost anything. Our world is becoming ‘instrumented’, ‘interconnected’ and ‘intelligent’. The IBM approach is to provideassurance, enable intelligence, automate processes and improve resilience.Dr Nataraj Nagaratnam, Chief Technology Officer for Software, IBM India Software LabWeTheneed to harness resources really well. There has to be decentralised thinking. We have ourselves to blame becausewe buy everything and do not develop things ourselves.Retired Vice Admiral Raman Puri, Network Centric Specialistkey challenge lies in deciphering the intent of a target individual, the travel and movement of a person, email andcommunication patterns and linkages. The present platforms do not tackle the issue of semantics fully. There havebeen several serious attacks by international hacking communicates on Indian government IT networks.TheMaoist challenge is a great threat to business and the economy. There are four major internal security threats –Jammu & Kashmir where 45000 people have been killed since 1949; the North East that has terrorist outfits wanting tosecede from India; Pak-aided terror attacks; and Maoist and Naxalite attacks, a 43-year-old problem. In June 2008, threetransmission towers in Bastar were blasted by Naxalites, resulting in a loss (business) of Rs 1500 crore. The following year,railway property, telephone towers, schools buildings, roads and culverts were destroyed by them. We do not have a singleR&D unit; Naxalites have. Dealing with ideologues and intellectuals calls for a different strategy. Communism regimeshave been junked in the countries of origin; here they are still active. We have to bring tribal people into the mainstream,have to win their hearts and minds by giving them some fruits of development.Mr M.L. Kumat, former Director General, Border Security ForceWehave lost too many lives and the frequency ofattacks has increased. If the nuclear capacity ofPakistan is not taken control of by the superpowers, itcould land in the hands of terrorists. The state policeforce is ill-equipped, ill-prepared, ill-trained. There islack of understanding of their problems. We are a weakstate, intelligence on the field is non-existent, and peopleare indifferent. We don’t have a database, don’t have thecapacity to access information, there is no coordinationor consciousness. It has taken 20 years for us to realisewe have a challenge on our hands. We need to cometogether and think as a nation.Mr A.K. Pandey,Inspector General of Police, InternalSecurity Division, Karnataka34