Today, the time is referred to as pre-Covid times, the Covid years, and everything that came after. During the months of lockdown, new trends were set online every day, as the internet became the hub of work, classes, socialisation, and entertainment. A place where people increasingly, lived their lives.
Half a decade later, as all our lives continue to revolve around screens, a cloud of threat looms over us. Every click on the web, along with gratification, brings us a step closer to cyber risks.
For Sushmitha Kishore Kumar Singh, what stood out was the increase in cybercrime among children. She strongly believed in the need to build a digital space that is easier and safer for children to navigate. So, she completed for the Cybercrime Intervention Officer (CCIO) programme in Australia. “I got certified in that, and then I was able to formally not just provide awareness programmes, but also provide intervention support to victims,” she notes.
The assistance work, combined with the Australian government’s independent initiatives such as the eSafety Commissioner, an online safety regulator that handles cyber safety, awareness, and education in all institutions in the continent, encouraged Sushmitha to form a similar resource in India. Hence, Digisafe India was born and formally registered in 2021.
Powering through dangers
The Digisafe India team has formulated a curriculum inspired by the ones followed in the US and Australia, where the syllabus proactively teaches and empowers students with the skills needed to safely navigate and make the right decisions in the online world.
The programme has a complete set of modules for social media, gaming addiction, digital footprint, blackmail, and scams, and each module covers real-life case studies. These video lessons are played in the classrooms — one video a week. Activities keep the students thinking about how to make the right decision, how to identify red flags, who is a fake person, who is a trusted adult, and who are they supposed to reach out to, when in trouble.
Addressing the twisted knots of the web one lesson at a time, Digisafe India has covered more than 30 schools in Bengaluru, mostly international schools. In Tamil Nadu, they have covered government-aided schools, military coalition schools, and CBSE schools.
In these sessions, often a cyber cell representative is invited as a guest speaker, along with an ethical hacker who does a hack show, a live demo, for example, to show how a phone camera can be hacked easily. “When students look at all these and experience them in life, they understand how dangerous it could be to click a link or download a random game,” shares Sushmitha.
While children are the focal point, Digisafe India wants to bring about change from the roots by equally helping parents decode a teenager’s language — the code words they could use, the apps they use to hide their photos — bust online myths, and explaining how to approach digital parenting, setting up parental controls, using applications that can help monitor the child without breaking their trust in them. Sushmitha adds, “Apart from engaging with students, we engage with parents, which makes it a holistic learning experience for the family instead of just one way.”
In India, the parent-child trust is missing, notes Sushmitha. “We need to bring the trust into the culture, to be able to speak very openly with the parent and the parent to be able to speak openly with the child, instead of going to AI to ask those questions,” she says. Additionally, certain programmes target teachers as well. “This way, we are able to engage different stakeholders who can impact a child’s behaviour and safety,” she shares.
Keeping pace, digitally
While the road towards safe online navigation was smooth enough, the programme hit a bump with the introduction Artificial Intelligence (AI). With it comes a new set of dangers in internet usage. That’s why the initiative’s focus now is also on AI safety and responsible usage. Along with the existing programme curriculum, AI modules are being pushed. In addition to the existing 100 modules, which are being circulated in schools, the team has created another 80 modules for AI safety alone. These lessons will now also be available in regional languages and for government schools in rural areas as well. “We want to keep reaching out to more people in a more structured way,” explains Sushmitha.
Along with the work done by Digisafe India and several NGOs that work towards a similar goal in the sub-continent, Sushmitha, verifying and understanding the government’s work, says that there needs to be a national initiative that takes this seriously. She acknowledges the numerous cyber safety awareness programmes happening in all the Indian states, but questions the depth of these projects.
In retrospect, Sushmitha accepts that the videos — which she creates by herself and runs with professionals for child safety — played in the course, will go obsolete because of the changes that are happening constantly. Therefore, the team refreshes the modules every year and ensure they include more details, as newer cases, scams, and frauds come in.
While the mission Sushmitha set out to work towards during the pandemic continues to be a work in progress, as a means of covering more topics, Digisafe India submitted a proposal to the Government of Tamil Nadu on August 19 and has been trying to meet the education minister to present it. “The new government has been proactive on AI education for students. What is missing is the safety layer. We are trying to demonstrate a weekly cyber safety period that protects 60 lakh students across the state. We hope to receive a response sooner rather than later to address this time-sensitive problem” says Sushmitha, who in the meantime, continues to spread awareness on social media.