Government increases allocation for cybersecurity projects in Budget 2024

In the interim budget of 2024, the Government of India has almost doubled the allocation of cybersecurity projects from Rs 400 crore in 2023-2024 to Rs 759 crore in 2024-2025. Majority of these projects are taken up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

The allocated budget for cybersecurity projects in 2022-23 was Rs 30 crore in 2022-23 but there has been a significant increase for the year 2023-24. In this year's budget, the allocation estimates have been revised to Rs 759 crore.

This comes at a time when there have been several cybersecurity attacks on government institutions, most notably the ransomware attack that affected All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 2023.

According to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) report released in November 2023, the agency tackled 1,391,457 cybersecurity incidents in 2022.

Out of the 1.39 million cybersecurity incidents that CERT-In tackled, the mitigation of vulnerable services accounted for the largest number of incidents handled by the agency, totaling 875,892.