Investment from China: The issue is control, not insulating sector

Clipped from: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/et-editorials/investment-from-china-the-issue-is-control-not-insulating-sector/ET Edit

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Can India draw in investment from China without compromising national security? Rather than sectors or levels of investment, policy must focus on control. Indeed, a growing economy like India should be happy to make use of capital from all across the world, including from China. However, such capital must come on terms that India determines to advance national security. And control is the key element in determining the capacity of a foreign investor to do anything more than rake in profits.

Can Chinese capital be allowed in national highways or ports or electricity grids? These are no longer passive infrastructure: all of them have control systems linked to programmable logic controllers, whose command can, in theory, be taken over by a hostile alien, particularly if routers or bits of software installed in the infrastructure contain Trojans meant to facilitate such hijacking. What kit procured from where and installed by whom under whose supervision is the key question. This is not determined by the national origin or level of foreign capital in the project. Rather, the issue is control over the relevant decision-making, and intelligent, enforced guidelines on what kind of gear can be deployed, backed up by the capacity to test kit for vulnerability from frequent random samples.