We don't lack the talent, we lack the incentives to drive such a talent pool. You arm the nerds from every tier 2 and tier 1 college of this country with perks as that of google or facebook, you will get at least a trainable unit. However, the cyber army requires prodigies, people who have the tendency to break things or find system loopholes.
Example, a couple of local government college students in my district found a loophole in apps such as zomato and swiggy to basically order free food. We need such kind of folks, not any average joe.
Of course, if you find one joe who is a prodigy, he or she can train average joes. The objective is not to do a hack, but to develop a hacker "mindset".
In a nation where thousands of people are allowed to occupy key national highways for months on end causing tremendous losses to the treasury and private businesses, are such efficiency standards possible?
what happened to the centers of excellence certificates to universities and 1000 crore for each of them? Are these universities going to develop good talent with these moneys? The whole policy seems to have died even before it began.
the thing is we still face basic problems like in housing, healthcare, water supply, sanitation, low rural income - that the government has its hands full and treasury booked to just service these problems. Unless these basic problems are solved within a timeframe, there simply is not going to be the will and moneys to move up in the technology value chain. And, no private sector won’t do government’s dirty work without a plausible deniability mechanism in place.
I think that until 2030 we will continue to remain weak, I’ll equipped and just develop as much as we can. And just use deterrence as much as we can to thwart powerful enemies. 2030 is when we are supposed to meet our SDG goals. And 2030 is when we probably will have a decent economy and a government efficiency plus industry ecosystem like in electronics that allows us to pursue a much more aggressive military and foreign policy. This assumes that a strong nationalist government remains at the center until 2030. If we descend into the 1990s leftie chaos, we are done for, and will forever become a weak nation, subservient to China for sure due to the vast difference in economy and budget sizes. The risk is still there as you never know with our ignorant voters - they may end up getting us back into coalition era where nothing happens, and we have a new PM every year, becoming the laughing stock of the world.