India needs a budget that synergizes digital prowess with cyber-risk intelligence.

 The Union Budget announcement of 2017 boosted the influx of digital operations and transactions within the government processes, corporations, as well as the public utility domain. After the demonetization drive, promotion of a digital economy featured high on the government’s agenda as part of the strategy to create a more transparent payments ecosystem.

Further, the endeavor towards a secure digital enablement in the country witnessed a major thrust with the announcement of setting up of a Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-Fin) to strengthen security of the financial sector especially in the aftermath of major incidents of cyber-related attacks and frauds.

While there have been significant efforts towards achieving the state of effective, efficient, and secure cyber capabilities, there is much ground to be covered. The government must capitalize on the existing momentum and aggressively leverage the key initiatives to realize their true economic potential, and an encouraging Budget 2018-19 would be the best catalyst to achieve the objectives.

In order to address the risks to digital adoption and implementation in the country, the government must invest in fortifying the fundamental links of the entire digital value chain. We are expecting an enhanced focus on digital awareness and cyber-skilling at the school and college levels through appropriate educational programs, facilities, and suitable budgets being allocated.

This will induce, if not assure, a culture of cyber cognizance and resilience in the country. Cyber issues must evolve from being seen as a mere IT-specific concern. When a cyber-attack happens, it impacts the consumers, the businesses, as well as the governments at large. Hence, awareness of the challenges and risks to digital operations must be reckoned as an information imperative for every section of the society that may get impacted.

At a macro-economic level, we must invest in producing talent and proficiencies that could act as the defense mechanism to safeguard critical information, processes, and machineries from any theft, breach, attack, or fraud having the potential to affect national productivity.

In this regard, it would be encouraging to see specific budget allocation for the foundation of a “cyber-military” that could dedicatedly work on making our systems more secure and vigilant. One of the key tasks in developing as a cyber-conscious economy would be to adopt a sustainable, future-proof national prowess that not only reacts to cyber mishaps quickly but is also proactive in anticipation of the potential threats.

Another expectation from the Budget this year from a Digital risk perspective would be the formalization of an inter-State information sharing agreement in order to leverage and synergize the digital expertise of various governments and their institutions in terms of knowledge, talent-pool, infrastructure, research and development, and experiences. The government could also consider investing in the establishment of dedicated cyber-security centres/programs for each state as an impetus to the Digital India drive.

Digitalization of processes has been very promising in India with the eKYC giving a major momentum to the banking and financial services sector, e-learning addressing the big gaps in our education system, DigiLocker ending document-fraud to a large extent, and Aadhaar-based Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) making consumers of the country’s poor section more empowered through subsidies and benefits.

If India as an economy is also able to tackle the menace of cyber-threat through smart investments, intelligent strategies and resilient infrastructures, the potential and scope of Digital India can be augmented several time over.

Now that, we are moving towards digitalization of most of the citizen services & government operations, there is large connected systems generating various sets of data. On one aspect, this increases the attack surface and therefore, needs special attention from National Security perspective, so in all such large projects, a percentage should be mandatorily allocated for security measures. The other aspect is to invest in setting up of infrastructure to analyse these data points to gauge the risk exposure of the country on various fronts.

To conclude, till date budgets always had focus on securing future of the India, but now we should have also have focus to ‘Secure’ Digital India.