India, Feb. 11 -- When the Union Budget was presented this year, one message was clear beneath the spreadsheets and sectoral allocations: Digital growth without cyber resilience is no longer economically viable. The budget did not treat cybersecurity as a niche technological concern or a back-office expense. Instead, it positioned trust, governance, and resilience as prerequisites for sustainable digital expansion, signalling a decisive shift in how the Indian State understands risk in a platform-driven economy.

Over the last decade, India's digital transformation has been breathtaking in scale. Public digital infrastructure, fintech adoption, cloud migration, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled service delivery, and data-driven governa...