It is almost going to be 10 months since our inception as an organization and through this post we are happy to share our first collaborative national campaign. Not producing a formal document, I would like to share an account of a very fruitful meeting we had with Lt. Vineet Kumar from The Cyber Peace Foundation and Mr. Vishal Kaushik from PRAHARI, UPES.

We started with sharing our experiences of conducting awareness programs in the country. The learning and challenges by all organisations were the same. After at least a decade of established cyber crime, it is necessary to understand that this protection or raksha(hindi) that we talk about under the umbrella term “Cyber Security” needs to be technical, legal and practical. The discussion on these fronts tossed new ideas and concepts. Cyber or Information Security is mostly confused to be technical, coded and wireless or hard wired. Cyber Security although in the simplest yet the most complicated way is a kind of nexus between optimal technology, awareness and the law. As we talked about this, many more ideas surfaced of dedicated campaigns for awareness and promotion of secure application development, personal cyber hygiene and other things.

This is when The E-Raksha campaign was highlighted. Originally, an initiative of The Cyber Peace Foundation, The E-Raksha project has been about reaching out to schools, talking to kids and disseminating safe digital practices. Apart from that the campaign is also about  events for identifying innovation, promoting careers in the field of Cyber Security and conducting competitions. The idea about E-Raksha has been that if all organisations, not just ours are working independently, there is going to be no impact analysis. Whether there is actual Cyber Security or not, we will never find out, whether there are the required number of professionals in the country, we will never know. Whether or not, people in one part of the country are using one particular technology or not, it is not going to be possible.

This campaign is going to be about doing what we do, and the same for the other organisations as well but by common standards and platform that will act as a common medium for people to interact. What exactly this is going to be will be clearer in the next few days. For now, what you can do as a reader/organisation/individual is write to us if you wish to be a part of the national campaign.