At a time when cyber attacks are rampant on government institutions, the Indian government in the
2024 interim budget nearly doubled the allocation for cybersecurity projects from ₹400 crore in 2023-2024 to ₹759 crore in 2024-2025. Majority of these projects are taken up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
In 2022-2023, the allocated budget for cybersecurity projects was ₹30 crore. However, for the 2023-2024 period, there was a significant increase. In this year's budget, the allocation estimates have been revised to ₹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.
The annual report of India's nodal agency for cybersecurity, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), released in November 2023, said that the agency handled 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.
