Financial emergency response centre for cyber security in the offing: Top official

In a bid to ensure cyber security and strengthen technology infrastructure, the central government is in the process of setting up a separate financial emergency response centre, a top official said today.

"One of the tasks of that will be also to monitor and ensure that any kind of unusual activity will be proactively pre-empted," Secretary of the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology Aruna Sundararajan said.

"Cyber security is a major concern all over but our systems are as safe as any other system elsewhere. We are trying to strengthen our infrastructure as we go forward because India is probably going to be more digital than other countries," she said.

The government, focusing on strengthening its cyber infrastructure, is in the process of setting up a separate financial emergency response centre, Sundararajan said, while participating in a session on Digital Economy at Jaipur Literature Festival.

At the time when the government is pushing reforms to make the economy digital, the issue of digital and financial literacy is important and hopefully that will be done, Sundararajan said.

"Financial literacy is something many people do not have even today. Digital technology will help people in a big way because they are becoming simpler day-by-day," she said, adding that for this, the government is coming with voice- enabled payment system.

"However, on technological front, it is not enough. We need to have more development to make it easy, we need local language enabled banking apps so that literacy is not a problem but these are coming so they are no big problem in the time to come," Sundararajan said.

Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer of NITI Ayog Amitabh Kant said by the year 2020, debit cards, credit cards and ATM cards will be redundant in the country given the fact that the government is pushing for digital payments.

"Nearly 85 % of transaction is being done in cash in the country. More cash creates problem of black money and corruption, therefore we need to move to a digital payment economy. We must have less cash economy for the good of India.

"The country in the last 45 years has issued only 12 bank licenses but in last 15 months, the government issued 21 payment bank licenses. The demonetisation has caused a disruption and has enabled the government to push digital payment in a much bigger way," Kant said.