National security today extends far beyond traditional defense and law enforcement. With critical infrastructure being increasingly owned and operated by private entities, safeguarding the nation demands deep public–private collaboration. This article explores how India can institutionalize such synergy to build resilience across physical and digital domains. It highlights the need for security-by-design in infrastructure, trusted intelligence-sharing mechanisms, and frameworks that bridge government oversight with private innovation. By cultivating trust, joint preparedness, and shared accountability, India can evolve a national resilience ecosystem where public and private sectors act as true partners in protecting the nation’s assets and citizens.
In an era defined by digital interdependence, hybrid threats, and complex interlinkages, and intertwined supply chains, the traditional boundaries of “national security” have dissolved. Once the exclusive domain of the state, national security today extends into every sector that powers the economy, from energy grids and transport systems to data centers, telecommunications, and corporate enterprises. The majority of this infrastructure is increasingly being built, owned, or operated by private entities. This fundamental shift means that national security is no longer a government-only responsibility; it is a shared duty between the public and private sectors.
The private sector’s role in securing the nation’s physical and digital assets has never been more critical. The challenge lies in moving from episodic cooperation during crises to a ‘crafted institutionalized collaboration’ that builds resilience as a continuous process.
National Security is a Shared Responsibility
National security today extends far beyond the military or intelligence establishment. It resides in our financial systems, logistics corridors, and even in the algorithms that govern digital platforms. The threats we face, be it cyberattacks, misinformation, terrorism, supply chain sabotage, or climate-driven disruptions, they do not respect institutional or jurisdictional boundaries.
In India, due to historical reasons a majority of critical infrastructure is public owned and managed. However, the private sector is fast adding to the list as it builds petrochemical plants, sea ports, airports, highways, telecommunication systems, energy generation and distribution infrastructure, and data centres of class and scale. This makes the private sector a crucial partner in safeguarding national stability. A cyberattack on a data center, a prolonged power failure, or a disruption in logistics can ripple through the economy and affect national morale as much as a conventional security incident.
Hence, public safety and private continuity are inseparable. When one falters, the other bleeds. The key question is no longer whether the private sector should be involved in national security, but how deeply and through what structured frameworks!
The first step toward synergy is recognition, recognising that private enterprises, utilities, and technology firms are the first responders and custodians of frontline resilience. Governments must therefore integrate them into national preparedness and response strategies, not as external stakeholders but as intrinsic components of the security architecture.
It is reassuring that the government in the last few years has been taking proactive steps to involve the private sector in national security. In the aftermath of Operation Sindoor the cooperation between private security agencies and the national civil defence set-up is an example.
Hon’ble Union Home Minister, Mr. Amit Shah has consistently emphasized that security, especially in the digital and industrial sectors, cannot be handled by the government alone and requires robust public-private cooperation. He views the private sector as a critical “first line of response” in national security architecture advocating closer public–private collaboration. He has suggested that government forces such as the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) could work jointly with private agencies and, over time, transfer certain security responsibilities to them. He has also championed the professionalisation of the private security workforce, calling for enhanced training programs in partnership with the CISF and greater recruitment of NCC-trained personnel to raise overall standards.
Above all, the Home Minister has linked a strong private security sector to economic growth, stating that the rise of industry and trade is impossible without it and that a safe business environment is vital for achieving India’s economic goals.
Resilience Must Be Designed, Not Reacted To
Resilience is often treated as a reactive measure, something to be addressed after a disruption or incident. But true resilience is built at the design stage. It is a question of architecture, not just response.
India’s ambitious infrastructure and digital transformation initiatives, smart cities, industrial corridors, and 5G networks, must all be developed with ‘security-by-design’ principles. That means building redundancy into systems, ensuring interoperability across jurisdictions, and embedding cybersecurity and physical protection measures from the outset.
Governments can create enabling regulations, but it is the private sector that must internalize resilience as part of its business strategy. A power grid operator, a telecom provider, or a fintech company must view resilience not as compliance but as competitiveness.
Thinking wishfully…, public-private synergy must move beyond consultation to co-design. This means joint vulnerability assessments, shared drills, and collaborative testing of response mechanisms. Crisis management exercises should simulate real-world interdependencies, because, as recent incidents have shown, failures rarely occur in isolation. Resilient infrastructure is not about eliminating risk but about ensuring that systems absorb, adapt, and recover quickly, and this requires both public oversight and private innovation working in sync.
Bridging the Intelligence Gap
While technology has evolved rapidly, one enduring barrier remains: trust. The greatest obstacle to public-private synergy in intelligence and threat management is not lack of data, but hesitation to share it.
Private security operations centers, corporate security teams, and critical infrastructure providers often detect anomalies, from cyber intrusions to suspicious behaviors, well before such intelligence reaches national networks. Yet, because of legal, procedural, or reputational fears, this data rarely flows upstream in real time.
On the other hand, government agencies often hold high-quality threat intelligence that could help private operators defend themselves better, but bureaucratic caution and data-classification constraints limit its dissemination.
To overcome this, India must move toward a trusted intelligence-sharing ecosystem that includes vetted private participants. Sectoral “fusion centers” or national threat intelligence exchanges could serve as secure bridges where both government and industry can contribute and consume validated intelligence.
The goal is not to blur jurisdictional lines but to build situational awareness across sectors. This requires clear guidelines on data handling, anonymisation, and accountability. Once trust is institutionalised through policy, the information flow will become as natural and continuous as the threats it seeks to counter.
Institutionalising Public–Private Synergy
Partnerships formed in the heat of a crisis often fade once the immediate threat passes. Sustainable national resilience demands sustained institutionalised collaboration, not episodic coordination.
A possible approach could be to establish Public–Private Resilience Councils. Such bodies could define protocols for cooperation across key threat domains like infrastructure protection, and supply chain security. The Hyderabad City Security Council (HCSC), where the Hyderabad police actively engages in public-private partnerships (PPPs) to enhance public safety and security is an example. These collaborations involve corporations, government agencies, and citizens to address key areas like traffic management, cybersecurity, women’s safety, and infrastructure security.
Regular joint exercises, shared contingency plans, and standardized information exchange mechanisms can operationalize trust and ensure preparedness.
In addition, structured cross-postings and exchange programs, where officers from public agencies and corporate security teams spend time embedded in each other’s environments, can significantly deepen mutual understanding and dissolve cultural barriers. The work stints of Capt. Raghu Raman as CEO of NATGRID and Mr. Amber Dubey as Joint Secretary, MoCA, illustrate the value of such lateral movement. Similar reverse postings of IAS and IPS officers into private sector roles should also be actively encouraged.
At the heart of such synergy lies human capital. Training, certification, and continuous professional development must evolve to bridge public and private security skill sets. Private training institutions, along with industry associations and academic centers, can play a catalytic role in building this shared competence base.
The vision should be a national resilience ecosystem, where every stakeholder knows their role before the sirens go off, where preparedness is habitual, not ceremonial!
Lastly, India’s rapid modernization and digital transformation have made its security landscape both more complex and more interdependent. Protecting national interests now requires seamless cooperation between government agencies, private corporations, and civil society. Public-private synergy is not a slogan, it is the operating system of modern security. To safeguard the nation’s assets, data, and people, both sectors must co-create frameworks of trust, co-design resilient systems, and co-own the responsibility of preparedness.
The future of national security will not be written by one side alone, it will be ‘co-authored’ by the state and the private sector, working as true partners in resilience.
The author is the Editor of SECURITY TODAY, and this article is adapted from his address delivered recently at the IISSM Annual Conclave, in Goa.
