Budget 2019: Cybersecurity – a holy grail for government’s Digital India dream

Union Budget 2019: Digital India is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream that is necessary for making India a $5 trillion economy. But the question of safeguarding the Internet properties has loomed over that dream, especially in the digital payments sector. Amid an urgent need to step up the firewall, the government has revealed the credit card/ net banking frauds in the financial year 2018-19 stood at 1,477.

A substantial part of the Digital India initiative is the digital payments that have grown exponentially over the last few years, thanks to the dirt-cheap Internet. In December last year, digital transactions in India were recorded at 2,069 crores, which is now expected to cross 8,707 crores by December 2021, as per estimates shared by a top bank in India. However, the increase in the number of transactions being carried out electronically attracts cyber threats that have been known to have crippled payments infrastructure in several countries.