Meet your online knight in shining armour

You’d expect an IPS officer at the helm of cyber security and compliance in India’s premier software association to be a tough-looking tyrant out to get online crimes deleted from the records. Nandkumar Saravade belies this image. The only police official in the National Association for Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), Saravade has a doctorate in cyber security from IIT Bombay, is affable, modest, and soft-spoken.

Now director of cyber security at Nasscom, India’s only IPS officer there is a vital part of the Cyber Safety Week currently on in Mumbai. Organised by Nasscom in collaboration with Mumbai Police, the programmes in the week-long event will build awareness among the common man about online security, and protection of data and financial assets on the Web.

Saravade is a civil engineer, but once he acquired his first computer in 1992, there was no looking back. He first got involved in cyber security in 2003, when his wife, another IPS officer, was involved in the Cyber Safety Week. “The cyber security cell gives me a chance to combine work with pleasure,” he says.

In an organisation plagued by little awareness, Saravade is a one-man army with a mission. “We don’t want policemen to trap cyber thieves at the touch of a button. They have to be first made aware; they need to know what the Internet and e-mail is all about,” he says. “Mumbai police has now set two cyber labs in Worli and Thane.”

Not surprisingly, his favourite books genre is science fiction. “Isaac Asimov is my favourite author,” he says, even though he likes Ray Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke, too. A self-confessed gadget freak, he likes to carry all his data in his Treo 600, one of the most versatile PDA phones in the market. Besides, he is also a regular blogger.

Despite the schedule — giving advice, and interacting with law enforcement agencies across India — Saravade feels he is “just doing my job, one that he can enjoy.”