Indian OS developed by DRDO likely to be ready in three years

Exhorting the need to have a robust cyber security system in place, DRDO chief V K Saraswat today said the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) alongwith other premier institutes is developing India's own operating system (OS), which is likely to be ready in next three years.

"One of the major elements of cyber security is having our own operating system because today we are dependent on all OS systems which are imported whether it is based on Windows, Linux which is likely to be having malicious worms/things and hence it is essential that we have our own OS," the DRDO Director-General said here.

Speaking to newsmen on sidelines of NAVCOM-2012', two-day international conference on Navigation and Communication that began here, Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister, said, "We have already started a major programme and are one-and-half-years into that programme. It (Indian OS) is a major effort requiring large number of software engineers working together."

He said 150 engineers were working across the country on creating Indian OS, and added it will take at least three more years for getting the Indian OS ready.

"It is our Indian effort...we are not having any foreign involvement in this," Saraswat pointed out.

Defence researchers and scientists should start working together with industry and DRDO and other scientific departments and bring country's own operating system soon, so that "we are independent from what is coming from outside world," he stressed.

Earlier, speaking at the event, he said cyber security networking was very important today in view of everything being network centric and on Information Technology.

"We are having high speed communication across the nodes and we are passing information which is very very critical for our security, safety and economic security," he said.

Saraswat said, "Cyber security requires two elements of having our own hardware and our own software. Country needs to go in a big way in this regard."

Emphasising the need for Industry, academia and all students to function together for making a defensive cyber security networking system, he said, "We have started a major programme on cyber security ensuring that all the basic elements of the network particularly, the switches and all servers which are presently imported and are vulnerable because of the malware likely to be present are done in our country and lot of work has been done on this front."

Another aspect of cyber security is to stop cyber crimes which can be done through strong laws so that people should not use the web for malicious purpose and "we should be able to punish the unscrupulous elements of the society who use web for such purposes," he said.

Communication amongst the various elements in war fighting centres is very important, however, the hardware aspect in communication was missing in the country with different varieties of radio sets being imported, he said.

Larger bandwidth is also required for our future applications because we will be providing communication among the various armed forces and civilian applications and hence bandwidth improvement and spectrum management becomes very important for communication, Saraswat added.