Cyber frauds are increasing day by day and to solve this problem Indian government has decided to impose a cess on every digital transaction which can be treated as a token. A report in ThePrint shows that the government is thinking to apply a Digital India cess or a ‘security fee’ on every payment that is made digitally in India. The Department of Financial Services has decided to take this step to use this cess as a fee that will be used to remove the cyber attacks.
The Center is also thinking about setting up a dedicated ”cyber-forensics lab” that will have 27,500 police personnel, along with 13,000 forensic officers, who will be trained to handle cyber fraud cases. Presently, users pay a lot of charges for digital transactions such as convenience fee, transaction charges, and cost for the plastic card, and merchant fees. Imposing another charge can make a big difference for the users are doing digital transactions in daily routine. Firstly, the government promoted digital India campaign and now they are making this very costly.
Like any other government policy, this one also has some positives. Cyber frauds targeting e-payments have been on the rise. Official figures show that cases related to e-wallets and e-payments frauds increased from 13,083 cases in 2014-15 to 16,468 cases in 2015-16. There is a big chance that these numbers will increase in 2017 and government is aware of it and trying to dave the consumers from these frauds. But the problem is the past record of government is very bad in implementing such laws. If this cess can be implied without any corruption and the money received will be used to protect users then this is a great policy.
