A fresh-faced Bangalore student is on a crusade to educate Indian school kids about the dangers skulking on the Internet and to drill into them the difference between Internet use and abuse.
Shaurya Saluja is barely 17. Through his RISE India (Raising Information Security Education India),Saluja is designing a cyber-safety and cyber-ethics curriculum that school boards in India can use to educate students on prudent ways of using the Internet.
India does not have an army of cyber cops scouring the Internet like in the West,waiting to catch crooks and perverts preying on young children, says Divya Bansal,assistant professor at the Cyber Security Research Centre at Punjab Engineering College. Bansal,who is guiding Saluja with the cyber safety curriculum,says self-patrolling is vital.
Saluja,who studies at Bangalores Indus International School was rudely wakened to the perils of the Internet a few months ago. At his grandparents home in Chandigarh,his ten-year old cousin pestered him to open a Facebook account for her. On her profile,she wanted to provide her age,her home address,the name of her school,her likes and dislikes (I hate getting back from school at…).
I was shocked at her ignorance and naiveté, said Saluja. His cousin only stopped short of giving out a personal phone number because her she did not have a cell phone. The rush to get online whether to finish a class project or to use instant messenger to chat with friends is making kids vulnerable. At Salujas Indus International,an exclusive school in the Sarjapura suburbs of Bangalore,students walk through the school gates to step into a wi-fi-enabled campus. The school is introducing a one-laptop-per-child rule from sixth grade onwards.
As computers come increasingly within the reach of average Indian school kids,children are vulnerable,says Saluja. There seems to be a large gap between the rush to get online and the awareness about doing it in a secure manner, he says. While the syllabus he is designing is for grades 9 to 12,Saluja says kids from third grade upwards need to be warned about taking safety measures such as not sharing passwords with anybody,not even their best friend,and not opening email attachments from random people.
Even among older kids,his own peers for instance,there is a mad rush to amass friends on social networking sites such as Facebook and Orkut because,the larger the number of friends,the higher your perceived status, bemoans Saluja. Many kids then end up accepting friend requests from strangers,and giving them access to all kinds of personal information from photos to posts on what you are planning to do over the weekend and where. They are clueless that people may be masquerading as somebody else on the Internet. In real life,kids are always warned not to speak with strangers but who is cautioning them about strangers online? he asks.
In the higher grades in Indian schools,general computer education is already a part of the syllabus but the education is theoretical rather than practical,criticises Saluja. The book will tell you what is a virus and who is a hacker but you will have no way of relating it all back to you when you are actually using your computer. Saluja wants to enlist NGOs and employees of technology firms such as Infosys and Wipro to train teachers and evangelise to school students about secure ways of using the Internet.
Indias kids want their cyber freedom. But if Saluja has his say,they will know not to download copyrighted material from the Internet. They will know that plagiarising content from the Internet and passing it off as original work is immoral. And importantly,they will learn to stay out of harms way as they ride the surf.
saritha.rai@expressindia.com
