Face2News/Chandigarh
India’s financial system needs a coordinated, multi-agency and multidisciplinary cyber defence, led by the Reserve Bank of India, to withstand AI-assisted hackers and attackers working for hostile sovereign powers. That is the view of KBS Sidhu, IAS (Retd.), former Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, and Founder-Editor of The KBS Chronicle. He has written to RBI Governor Shri Sanjay Malhotra urging the Reserve Bank to take the initiative.
KBS Sidhu congratulated the RBI Governor on the RBI’s greenfield Data Centre and Enterprise Computing and Cybersecurity Training Institute at Info Valley-II, Jatni, near Bhubaneswar. Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi inaugurated the facilities on Sunday, 25 October 2026. KBS Sidhu described the 18.55-acre campus as a citadel. He argued that it must be treated as the start of a continuous process, not as a completed project, because adversaries now probe and adapt at machine speed.
“The Prime Minister could hardly have overemphasised the point that wars are no longer fought with weapons alone,” KBS Sidhu said. “The quickest way to paralyse a modern economy is to jam its payments. A forty-eight-hour disruption of UPI, RTGS, NEFT, the e-rupee and the settlement layer behind them would halt salaries, mandi payments, pension credits and fuel purchases without a shot being fired.”
In his letter, KBS Sidhu has made five suggestions to the RBI Governor:
1. A live failover drill. Critical operations should periodically be switched from the RBI’s primary data centre at Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, to Jatni for real, on a working day. “A backup that has never carried live load is a hope, not a backup.”
2. Seats for the weakest links. Urban and state cooperative banks, regional rural banks and smaller NBFCs should get guaranteed, subsidised training at the Jatni Institute, with modules in Indian languages and outreach courses held in the districts.
3. Continuous, AI-assisted red-teaming. Adversarial testing should use the same class of AI tools the attackers now use, going beyond periodic compliance audits.
4. Indigenous defensive capability. Foreign frontier AI tools for cyber defence are welcome. Yet such access was suspended for nearly three weeks this June under another country’s export controls. India’s financial defences, therefore, should not depend on a switch held in another capital.
5. A post-quantum roadmap. The “harvest now, decrypt later” threat calls for a dated plan to migrate payment and settlement systems to quantum-resistant cryptography.KBS Sidhu’s central recommendation concerns coordination. The RBI, SEBI, NPCI, CCIL (the Clearing Corporation of India) and IFSCA (the regulator at GIFT City) each guard their own houses, he pointed out, whereas a hostile actor would strike at the joints between them.
He quoted Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.” He proposed “consistent but independent citadels”: consistent in standards, shared threat intelligence and joint exercises, perhaps under the Financial Stability and Development Council, but independent in infrastructure so that a breach in one cannot cascade into the others. He urged the Reserve Bank to lead an annual joint stress test with SEBI, the National Stock Exchange, BSE and the commodity exchanges, covering payment, settlement, foreign-exchange and hedging infrastructure together.
A copy of the letter has been endorsed to the Union Finance Minister, for coordination with SEBI and other statutory agencies.
Chandigarh
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