India now lives online. People pay for groceries with a phone, do bank KYC online and consult doctors over a video call. Banks, hospitals and government offices depend on systems that must work every hour of every day, and when those systems are compromised, people feel the pinch through lost savings, leaked personal data, confidential records or a service that is no longer available. Keeping those systems secure 24/7 has become one of the most important and rewarding careers of the decade. It’s not just big companies that need to protect their digital systems – small businesses that use digital payments, e-commerce and cloud platforms need to keep customer information and business data safe.
The professionals who protect these systems need training in the classrooms. That is why the conversation about cybersecurity cannot be left only to companies and government agencies. Universities offering the programme to fill the skill gap sit at the core of the curriculum. The progress that the nation makes starts in the classrooms.
The uncomfortable reality is that India has a shortage of graduates who are ready to defend a real system against the real attacker. A student can finish the degree with excellent marks in networks and operating systems, and still never have seen how a hacker moves through a company’s tech infrastructure because they have no hands-on experience.
Cybersecurity should not be an optional subject that students are introduced to in the initial semesters. It should run through the whole degree. A student writing a first program should hear, early on, that code can be attacked and that good engineers must think about this while they are coding. A student designing a database should be asked who might want that data and how they might get it.
Instinct also needs practice. People learn to respond to an attack the way pilots learn to handle an emergency, by rehearsing it until the right moves come naturally. A lab session where something goes wrong on purpose teaches more than a chapter ever will. That kind of teaching depends on educators who are current themselves, and here higher education must be honest. Faculty members carry heavy loads of teaching, research and administration. Expecting them to keep pace with a field that changes every few months, without giving them time or support to do so, is unfair to them and to their students.
Letting faculty spend time inside industry would help them stay current, while bringing practitioners into classrooms as mentors rather than occasional guests would add something just as valuable. Live examples shared by industry stalwarts show students how ideas work in real situations, which makes learning easier to grasp and far more practical. Together, these steps would help both sides understand what the other needs. Continuous faculty training and development is therefore essential to keep educators current on emerging threats and practical security approaches. Opportunities for faculty to work with industry and for practitioners to contribute to classroom learning can help link academic teaching to real-world requirements.
Universities across the country are already responding to this need, and the progress will be encouraging. Dedicated undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in cybersecurity, digital forensics, identity access management and information security are now being offered in many institutions, giving students a clear path into the field from the start of the journey. Dedicated programmes are a strong start, but the same thinking should reach every engineering student, not only those who enrol in them. Even so, the task cannot be done without potential employers willing to hire promising juniors and train them, rather than waiting for a perfect candidate who does not exist. Government and industry bodies can keep encouraging courses that reflect what the country needs. But the starting point is the classroom. If the way this subject is taught changes, the rest of the chain gets stronger.
India does not need to look far for its next generation of cyber defenders. They are already in lecture halls and laboratories, curious and capable, waiting for the right opportunity to learn and scale. When universities, employers and policymakers keep investing in that learning, early and with real problems, today’s students will grow into the professionals who keep the country’s digital environment safe for years to come. NIIT University ensures that cybersecurity is embedded in students’ learning across disciplines and not as a standalone subject through faculty training and development and by integrating cybersecurity principles across the curriculum.
Authored by Prof. Prakash Gopalan, President, NIIT University
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