INDIA INCREASINGLY USING ADVANCED DIGITAL PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES: UN REPORT

India is the only “lower middle-income” country which has made it to the second group of leading economies in the field of Advanced Digital Production (ADP) technologies, along with countries such Australia, Canada, Italy, Singapore and Spain, according to a report titled, “Industrialising in the Digital Age” released by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO).

“Indian research centres and companies are patenting new innovations in ADP technologies in leading markets such as the EU, Japan and the USA. They are also embedding these technologies in new capital goods (smart machines) that they increasingly export abroad. Besides the manufacturing capacity, India has also a strong position in the knowledge intensive business and ICT services that control and connect these technologies on the shop floor, between supply chain partners and with markets,” René Van Berkel, Representative of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation in India said.

The ADP technologies have also picked up pace during the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought to the forefront the concept of digital age and almost overnight businesses, governments, educational institutions, healthcare providers and many others went online and people are now becoming accustomed to tele-education, tele-health, tele-government and teleworking.

The boundaries between the physical and digital are also increasingly getting blurred through ADP technologies that combine hardware, software and connectivity. Robots are being deployed in patient care; drones are being used to deliver critical supplies,

Three reminders on the same subject of possible data theft and related cyber security, spread over a period of one year, have not been able to elicit a response from the different establishments under the Department of Telecommunication (DOT), Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication.

The DOT, after receiving inputs that data ex-filtration (data-theft) was taking place from the websites of establishments that are under the DOT, had asked these establishments to do a security audit of their websites and submit a security audit certificate. However, despite the first such notice being shared in the first week of October 2019, till date, most of these establishments have neither done a security audit nor submitted a certificate, despite the DOT sharing multiple reminders, the last of which was sent on 17 July 2020.

The establishments that are sitting on Dot’s request and have refused to take the issue of cyber attack and data theft seriously include important bodies such as the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appel