With growing digital indulgence and technological shift, the matters of privacy and secured networking and storage channels also become of prime importance and require equally robust support systems and mechanisation. Building and replicating a technology is one challenge. Another challenge, rather trickier one, is posed when all these technologies get interconnected to form a web of the country’s total digital & cyber undertakings and the state is met with piling needs to protect its cyber net. This vulnerability gives birth to the need of developing strong data protection systems and technologies.
One such data protection solution is the technology of ‘Quantum key distribution’ (QKD) which is a secure communication technology that uses quantum physics to construct a cryptographic protocol. It allows two parties to generate a shared secret key that is only known to them and can be used to encrypt and decrypt messages. For the first time in India, a team of DRDO scientists and IIT Delhi successfully demonstrated a Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) link between Prayagraj and Vindhyachal in Uttar Pradesh spanning over 100 kilometres, using a commercial-grade optical fibre that was already on the market. In the test runs, the performance parameters for this QKD were found to be repetitively within the reported international standards at sifted key rates of up to 10 KHz.
With this breakthrough, the country has demonstrated its own secure key transfer method, which can be used to bootstrap a military-grade communication security key hierarchy. The QKD technology will further enable India’s security agencies to plan a suitable quantum communication network with indigenous technology backbone.
A report by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) highlighted India’s remarkable growth in the cyber space. It said that India’s cyber security industry nearly doubled in size amid the pandemic, with revenues from cyber security products and services growing from $5.04bn in 2019 to $9.85bn in 2021. India, its startups, various industries and public & private institutions are also getting acquainted and/or working on other tech-solutions and systems like the blockchain technology, Digital Forensics Technology, modern data science tools, vulnerability assessment & penetration testing tools and solutions, etc.
To build even better capacity towards this, the government has been making relevant provisions in the budget and various policies. Budget 2022, under GIFT-IFSC, talked about Data Centres and Energy Storage Systems including dense charging infrastructure and grid-scale battery systems to be included in the harmonized list of infrastructure. This will facilitate credit availability for digital infrastructure and clean energy storage. It also mentioned Blended Financing solutions where Government backed Funds like ‘NIIF’ and ‘SIDBI Fund of Funds’ have provided scale capital creating a multiplier effect. For encouraging important sunrise sectors such as Climate Action, Deep-Tech, Digital Economy, Pharma and Agri-Tech, the government proposes to promote thematic funds for blended finance with the government share being limited to 20 per cent and the funds being managed by private fund managers.
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