Indian government’s most transformational campaign “Digital India’ has the potential to drive the country’s social and financial quest to become a new age India through transparency and simplified online services. Being the second largest country in terms of smartphone users with an expectation to cross 1.5 billion users in the next  25 years, the campaign shows bright future ahead.

Under the initiative, the government is committed to developing ICT infrastructure at the Gram Panchayat level to provide on-demand availability of public services such as health, education, etc and empower the citizens with digital literacy to ensure more transparency and accountability in government processes.

But, the rising threats to cyber security, personal data protection, phishing assaults, malware attacks, ransomware, etc are challenging the government’s plan to achieve the full potential of the campaign. As cyber security is a major cause of concern for the government, Central Bank, businesses, as well as individuals, the need to secure cyberspace in India’s developing ICT infrastructure is the need of the hour.

As per the data analysis made by Statista, in India in the financial year 2021, more than 3.8 thousand government services have been offered online to reach out to the maximum population at their fingertips. Digital payments in India are also recorded as US$ 300 billion in 2021 and are expected to touch the US$ 1 trillion mark by 2026. But the absence of financial/digital literacy and personal data protection law with regulatory framework attracts numerous threats in virtually connected Indian cyberspace.

As cyber-attacks are increasing and sophisticated digital assaults have been made on personal data, a more centralized, simple, cost-effective yet dynamic policy framework is required to address the challenges. The protection of cloud applications, remote workspaces, and digital supply chains along with personal data is now a necessity.

The mission-critical approach towards the modern approaches of data protection with organizational and individual training to deal with cyber security threats is a vital part of the strategy to counter its evil effects. In the scenario, the use of redundant cloud storage and data insurance in the instance of disaster recovery will safeguard the vision of the Digital India Campaign in a well-secured environment.