27th April

Learning a Lesson

The article insists on schools across India to learn the lesson from the recent two incidents happened in the national capital and upgrade their medical facilities on urgent basis. The author strictly believes that an end to the corporal punishment must be enforced and followed. 

The incidents of Shanno Khatun and Akriti Bhatia are not the isolated ones. Such incidents have happened and continue to happen in the schools across India since ages. The doubt is to what extent schools are sensitive towards children especially the ones with medical conditions. Schools argue that they cannot function as hospitals. But there is certainly a need to upgrade the health facilities at schools with respect to human resource and medical equipments. First aid is the matter of past now and schools need to move ahead. Better life saving drugs, oxygen cylinders, stretchers, vehicle to move student quickly to hospital, an in-house doctor and a trained nurse is what is the idea of an ideal medical system in schools. Schools can even have arrangement with neighbouring hospitals to move students in case of emergency. Private schools that charge high fees can certainly afford this upgradation. For government schools, its time to improve their general conditions, be it staff or medical facilities. There should also be strict resistance to corporal punishment. 

While there is a ban on corporal punishments, seldom it is followed. Thus, rigorous enforcement of ban on corporal punishment is the only way out to stop such incidents. 

Virtual War

The article asserts that India needs to follow the steps of US to upgrade its cyber security systems to protect its precious data from being hacked. 

Recently, hackers successfully penetrated the Pentagon’s network and copied several terabytes of data of US DoD’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter, its costliest weapons programme ever, and its air force’s air traffic control system. Before that, US electricity grid was also hacked by a malware that could have caused disruptions in the grid, if activated. India’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) was also attacked in March this year by a worm originating from China. It’s high time that nations need to protect their data stored in computers and servers from falling into the wrong hands otherwise the time is not far when the countries would be attacked by computers rather then bombs. Taking a cue from the attacks, US govt has planned to set up a Pentagon cyber command that would coordinate computer-network defense and direct US cyber attack operations. India should also follow the lead and protect its NIC that can give access to all the departments, including defense and home, if attacked. It is all the more important considering the fact that NIC has been attacked as much as 12 times in the past two years. Worrying thing is still the nations aren’t all probing each other’s computer systems. Involvement of unofficial groups adds to complexity.

As the cyber espionage increased the attacks become more and more sophisticated. India needs to strengthen its cyber security in order to protect the country.