India is preparing to roll out a new cyber-security system, amid reports it was among the top five countries compromised by US surveillance.

The National Cyber Coordination Centre's primary job is to carry out a real-time assessment of cyber security threats and provide actionable reports.

According to data compiled by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, more than 1,000 government websites, storing critical and sensitive data concerning national security, have been hacked by cyber criminals in the last three years.

In early March, suspected Chinese hackers breached the computers of India's top military organization, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, one of the biggest security breaches in the country's history.

President of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, Subho Roy, says protecting against cyber-attacks is important.

"We should have some framework in place to address cyber attacks on our vital installations...on our government facilities and a host of other things which we think are critical for our country's growth, development and the wellbeing our citizens," he said.

"So I would think this is a very welcome step - a little too late in the day perhaps, but it is better late than never."

Studies show internet usage in India has been rising exponentially.

The country has the fastest internet traffic growth globally - expected to have 348 million users by 2017, up from 138 million in 2012.

Rajesh Chharia, Director and CEO of C J Online, India's first operational private ISP, says with such high targets, internet security will become increasingly critical.

"When lot of people will come to join the internet family, at that time the security for securing the internet user is very important," he said.

"Our government is very aggressively doing that so that no one gets harmed from internet use.

"Definitely we are going to protect our entire critical infrastructure, as well as our general infrastructure, because when everything is moving online and everything is coming on to the internet cloud, it becomes a major responsibility to secure our system very strongly."

Data fears

India's Government is also taking steps to allay fears of misuse, naming the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to oversee the project.

The project follows revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden exposing alarming details of a top-secret US program to collect personal data of millions of web users.

Author Suketu Mehta says this has led to huge concern in India.

"If the American Government wanted to snoop on Manmohan Singh's Gmail account, there is absolutely no legal sanction that would prevent it from doing so," he said.

"So I would be very concerned if I was an Indian, the American Government can find out who you are emailing, who you are calling, who your lovers are, how much you earn, what you think of your country and family."

Subho Roy says state-level spying should not be raising fears.

"I think compromising of individual's citizen data would be a rare case unless there is a specific case against the individual which is being monitored and there are rules for all of this," he said.

The cyber-security challenge is also raising questions over whether India has the required expertise to prevent cyber attacks.

Surveys indicate that the country needs as many as 500,000 professionals in the field within five years.

Currently, there are only about 37,000 cyber security professionals.

Mr Roy says there is a big gap between demand and supply and the new infrastructure requires a lot of trained manpower.

"We do have them, in the sense that we have the largest number of IT producing countries," he said.

"But they need to be trained for a specific task, which is not very easy.

"But this [project] requires training for the same people in a slightly different manner and orientation [and] there is a serious lack of such engineers in our country."