India's cyber spending isn't catching up amid rise in security breaches

On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal Twitter account got hacked. Although the Prime Minister’s Office quickly issued a statement regarding the security breach, the hackers put out two tweets from the prime minister’s account. The government has set up a team to investigate the breach, but the incident has put the spotlight on cybersecurity concerns in India.

India is expected to be one of the largest victims of cyber attacks in two years with attacks increasing by 200 percent year on year. The main reason behind are manifold, top most being the geopolitical conflict with its neighbours, especially China, Kanishk Gaur, founder, India Future Foundation, a non-profit focused on cyber awareness, told Business Standard

As per Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) data, while India reported 53,177 incidents in 2017, the number of cybersecurity-related incidents had increased four times in 2018. There was a three-times increase in cybersecurity-related incidents in 2020 compared to 2019, as India recorded 1.16 million breaches. The number of breaches is expected to increase in 2021 as well. In the monsoon session, the government had informed the Parliament that 607,220 incidents had already taken place till June 2021.

While cybersecurity incidents have been increasing exponentially, spending has not increased commensurately. As per revised estimates, India’ spending on cybersecurity is only expected to increase 40 per cent to a meagre Rs 170 crore in 2020-21. Although other departments and states also tend to spend on cybersecurity, a significant proportion is carried out by the ministry of electronics and information technology.

The government had budgeted Rs 410 crore this year, but a Business Standard analysis shows that it may not meet its target. In 2020-21, the initial budget for cybersecurity was Rs 310 crore but was pared down to Rs 170 crore in the revised estimates.

Moreover, data indicates that the actual spending has consistently been lower than the budgeted amount in the last four years. For instance, in 2019-20, while the government had envisaged spending Rs 162 crore on cybersecurity, the revised estimates brought down the spending to Rs 137 crore. By the end of the year, the government could only spend Rs 122 crore on cybersecurity.

Further analysis shows that the government spends pale in comparison to other economies. The UK, in 2016, had envisaged spending 1.9 billion pounds or Rs 18,050 crore over the next five years. India had only spent Rs 595 crore during this period.