Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday warned that modern warfare is no longer confined to battlefields, saying a country can also be weakened by attacking its economy, as he underlined the need to protect India's banking system from cybercriminals and what he called cyber terrorists.
Modi was speaking in Bhubaneswar after inaugurating the Reserve Bank of India's new data centre and Cybersecurity Training Institute, two facilities built at a cost of 169 crore rupees. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Reserve Bank Governor Sanjay Malhotra and Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi were present at the event.
"We all know that wars today are not fought with weapons alone. A country can also be weakened by attacking its economy. As India grows stronger economically, safeguarding our banking system against cybercriminals and cyberterrorists has become equally essential," the Prime Minister said.
The warning comes at a time when India's digital payments ecosystem has expanded dramatically, bringing millions of first-time users into formal banking and digital transactions. That expansion, Modi suggested, has made the security of financial infrastructure a matter of national importance, not merely a technical concern for banks and regulators.
Modi stressed that the nature of cyber threats is changing rapidly, and that old systems, outdated training methods and obsolete tools are inadequate to meet the challenge. "We need modern infrastructure and a skilled workforce to meet these challenges effectively. The role of the new cybersecurity training institute is significant in this context," he said.
The new institute, he added, would play a vital role in building the human capacity needed to defend India's financial system. Its task will be to train professionals who can anticipate, detect and respond to attacks that are growing more sophisticated by the year, from phishing and fraud aimed at individual customers to larger assaults on institutional networks.
The Prime Minister also used the occasion to draw a contrast between the last decade and the decade ahead for Indian banking. The past ten years, he said, were about extending banking services to people who had long been deprived of access. The coming decade, he argued, would be about making banking more efficient and more trustworthy, a goal that requires robust data centres and powerful computing systems.
That framing reflects a broader shift in the government's financial inclusion story. The push to open bank accounts for the poor, to deliver subsidies directly into those accounts, and to build a digital payments backbone has been one of the defining projects of Modi's tenure. The Bhubaneswar facilities are presented as the next stage of that project, the infrastructure that will keep the system safe as it grows.
Modi also launched a sharp attack on previous Congress governments, alleging that their policies pushed the banking system to the brink of collapse and led to a mounting crisis of non-performing assets. He said banks were nationalised in the 1960s and 1970s in the name of helping the poor, yet until 2014 more than half the country's population remained outside the banking ecosystem.
Banking products and services, including loans, were a distant dream even for many middle-class families, he said, while poor people, small farmers, landless women and girls could not even imagine accessing them. The situation, he argued, changed after 2014, when banking services, debit cards and credit cards became far more widely available.
He recalled a former Prime Minister's observation that only 15 paise of every rupee sent from Delhi reached the intended beneficiaries, and said the system had since changed, with funds now reaching beneficiaries' bank accounts directly. Direct benefit transfers, he suggested, had cut out the middlemen who once siphoned off public money.
The Prime Minister also pointed to the benefits that formal banking has brought to small entrepreneurs, traditional artisans, street vendors and workers in the unorganised sector, many of whom gained access to formal financial services for the first time. India's banking sector, he said, had become among the most efficient in the world, with people able to access services around the clock.
Modi described the new facilities as a reflection of a new national priority, and said eastern India was emerging as a powerful growth engine of a developed India. Odisha, he suggested, stood to benefit directly from the investment, both in terms of skilled jobs and in terms of the resilience of the financial infrastructure serving the region.
The emphasis on cybersecurity also fits a wider global pattern. Central banks and financial regulators around the world have been warning that the financial system is an attractive target for hostile actors, precisely because disrupting payments or stealing data can cause panic and economic damage without a single shot being fired. India's own experience with large-scale digital fraud has reinforced that concern at home.
For ordinary customers, the message from Bhubaneswar is twofold. First, the government wants them to trust the digital banking system enough to keep using it. Second, it wants them to understand that this trust depends on constant investment in security, training and technology, the kind of investment the new data centre and training institute are meant to represent.
Whether the new institute lives up to that ambition will depend on the quality of its training, the calibre of its faculty and its ability to keep pace with attackers who are themselves constantly innovating. But the Prime Minister's speech made clear that, in the government's view, cybersecurity is no longer a back-office concern. It is, he argued, a front line of national security, and the banking system is one of the places where that battle will be fought.
The Bhubaneswar visit also underlined how central Odisha has become to the government's infrastructure plans. The data centre will handle vast volumes of financial data, and its location in the eastern region spreads critical infrastructure beyond the traditional metropolitan hubs, reducing concentration risk and bringing high-skilled technical work to the state.
Officials have pointed out that modern data centres are judged not only by their computing power but by their resilience, their energy efficiency and their ability to keep operating through disruptions of every kind.
For banks themselves, the message was equally direct. Institutions that once treated cybersecurity as a compliance cost are now being told to treat it as a core business function, with trained staff, tested response plans and systems that are updated continuously.
The training institute is expected to work closely with banks, regulators and law enforcement, so that lessons from real incidents feed back into the classroom rather than remaining locked inside individual institutions.
(Reporting based on The Indian Express and The Hindu.)