Stressing that India is lagging behind in defending itself in cyber warfare, senior BJP leader and former Union Minister Arun Shourie on Sunday said India must firewall all its strategic establishments.
“The sad part is that the government’s initiative to firewall important establishments is still lingering where it was 10 years ago,” Mr. Shourie said at a programme here. He said Chinese hackers had intruded upon the personal computer of the Dalai Lama and there have been cyber attacks targeted on the US and European countries besides India. “Their confidence was shaken. But in India, it didn’t even create a ripple,” Mr. Shourie said. He said with the click of a button our enemies can paralyse our important and strategic establishments or even the country.
“Besides foreign countries, we need to be on our guard against terrorist organisations, who are known to be highly proficient in technology,” Mr. Shourie said, adding that China has been very explicit and has listed out 15 to 20 points where they want to strike and paralyse and disorient another country.
“Time to monetise PSUs’ unproductive assets” At an event organised by the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) here, he said that public sector units (PSUs) should be saved by monetising its unproductive assets.
“We must monetise our unproductive assets to save PSUs. During my time (as a disinvestment minister) we had discovered that VSNL had 700 acres of prime land in many cities. Now, if unproductive assets like these are sold off, it can generate crores of rupees in revenue,” Mr. Shourie said.
He said there were seven banks in the country which were heavily burdened with NPAs (non-performing assets). “They need Rs. 4,00,000 crore for recapitalisation. You can’t increase their revenue and you can’t decrease their expenditure either,” said the former MP, adding that full disclosure should be made mandatory for banks. Without taking names, Mr. Shourie said one corporate house in India owed Rs. 1,22,000 crore to banks and another owed Rs. 58,000 crore. On the defence sector, he said 88 per cent of the Army’s budget went towards paying salaries, pension, and other maintenance works, wondering ‘with this, how we are going to modernise our defence forces and face up to China’. He said every year, tonnes of grains rot in the open during monsoon, ‘because the Food Corporation of India can then sell it to the liquor industry at cheaper rates’.
