PM Modi Lauds Digital India Efforts As India Ranks 10th In ITU’s Global Cybersecurity Index 2020

NEW DELHI: Lauding India’s effort taken in direction of Digital India and digital empowerment, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said India has joined the top ten of global cybersecurity ranking of countries.

India rose from 47th to 10th place in the United Nations’ ITU Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA), ahead of China, which is ranked 33, and Pakistan, which is ranked 79. The United States is placed 1, followed by the United Kingdom.

While speaking at a virtual event to commemorate the completion of six years of Digital India, Modi said India is fully aware of its duties as a “data powerhouse,” and that work on all elements of data protection is now underway.

The Global Cybersecurity Index 2020 (GCI) is a compound index that is produced, analyzed, and published by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations (UN) body for information and communication technologies, which is a specialized unit of the UN, to measure the guarantee of its 194 member states to raise cybersecurity awareness. India has jumped 37 places in GCI 2020.

The most recent report is the 4th GCI edition, the first edition was launched six years back.

According to an official release, the GCI assesses countries’ commitment to cybersecurity on a worldwide scale in order to raise awareness of the issue’s relevance and various dimensions.

Because cybersecurity has a wide range of applications in many industries and sectors, each country’s level of development or engagement is assessed along five pillars – I Legal Measures, (ii) Technical Measures, (iii) Organizational Measures, (iv) Capacity Development, and (v) Cooperation – and then aggregated into an overall score, according to the release.

Modi talked through video conference to beneficiaries of Digital India programmes such as Diksha, eNAM, eSanjeevani solution for telemedicine, DigiBunai, and PM SVANidhi.

Modi emphasised the crucial role that technology played during the pandemic in ensuring the continuity of education, access to healthcare, and other citizen services, and he added that digital solutions developed by India during this time are being recognised globally.