Power Play

Recent statements by persons in authority suggest that power outages in major cities like Mumbai can be the result of malware planted by hackers. What legal options exist?

- Sujit Bhar

THERE was a major power outage in Mumbai on October 12, 2020 that lasted two hours and threw the unsleeping city into chaos. The stock market went on the blink and many people lost a lot of money. Such incidents were once supposed to be the residual stink of civilisation, but just the other day the state’s home minister, Anil Deshmukh, told the media that “preliminary finding of an investigation by the cyber cell” found that it was probably the misdeed of Chinese hackers. He said that the hackers had planted some malware that invaded the overall system. Politics quickly took over, and Union energy minister Raj Kumar Singh categorically denied any Chinese hand, saying it was just “human error”.

One can cling to clues, such as one comment that yes, there was possibly some malware doing its mala fide job in some extremity of the power grid, but it did not manage to climb back into the main fold of the grid. So, aall is well now. Deciding who is right is a completely obtuse exercise, but one does need to look inwards and inspect what happened to India’s cyber security laws, and how protected we are, legally. Before that, we need to understand how the power sector can be affected remotely through malware. As the Indian power sector grew at a rapid pace, there was a huge need for intelligent control units for complex national grid interfaces. Of course, the retarded practice of L1 selection even in a global contract/tender meant that contracts went to Chinese companies.