The Armed Forces are short of 13,000 officers. About 50 lakh police posts are vacant across the country. The country needs at least 20,000 trained cyber security experts over the next three to five years. Recently, when the government searched for cryptologists, the best brains were working abroad. This is the grim reality that the National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon shared in his Bangalore lecture.
“The shortage of personnel is particularly noticeable in national security fields, where most of the jobs that we seek to fill today did not exist a few decades ago. This is partly because the education system does not prepare people for new or emerging security tasks,” Mr. Menon said. The proposed National Defence University should bridge the gap to some extent, he said.