Mobile technology has revolutionised our day to day lives. It has brought many benefits and advantages to us like mobile banking, mobile governance and so on. However, mobile technology has also brought its own share of nuisances and disadvantages.

For instance, the android system is facing tremendous malware attacks as it is the most popular and prominent operating system for mobiles. Since mobile have been associated with both financial and personal information these days, it is pertinent to ensure mobile cyber security in India.

The mobile phone subscriber base of India has crossed over 870 million. Indian government has realised the importance of this widespread base to provide its public services. Indian government is giving a push to mobile governance (m-governance) to spearhead its initiatives and projects.

In order to achieve this objective, web sites of all government departments and agencies shall be made mobile-compliant, using the “one web” approach. Similarly, open standards shall be adopted for mobile applications for ensuring the interoperability of applications across various operating systems and devices as per the government policy on open standards for e-governance.

Uniform/ single pre-designated numbers (long and short codes) shall be used for mobile-based services to ensure convenience. All government departments and agencies shall develop and deploy mobile applications for providing all their public services through mobile devices to the extent feasible on the mobile platform. They shall also specify the service levels for such services.

However, m-governance in India has its own problems and using the m-governance without removing these hurdles would be counter productive in the long run. The cyber security in India is not in a very good shape and it needs to be improved on numerous counts. It is only now that the cyber security policy of India has been cleared by the Indian government and its implementation is still awaited.

In these circumstances India must carefully implement the m-governance policy so that risks of mobile governance do not overweigh its benefits.