Bhubaneswar: The Reserve Bank of India's newest building is a data centre, and the Prime Minister used its opening on Sunday to argue that money is now a battlefield.
"We all know that wars today are not fought with weapons alone. A country can also be weakened by attacking its economy. As India grows stronger economically, safeguarding our banking system against cybercriminals and cyberterrorists has become equally essential," Narendra Modi said after inaugurating the ₹169-crore campus.
The facility sits on 18.55 acres and houses four data centres that will host mission-critical payment and settlement systems, including RTGS and NEFT. Officials said it is certified to the Uptime Institute's Tier IV standard, the highest benchmark for data-centre resilience, making it one of the largest such banking facilities anywhere.
On the threat itself, Modi was blunt about the tools. "The nature of cyber threats is changing. We cannot confront these emerging challenges with outdated systems, old training methods and obsolete tools. We need modern infrastructure as well as a skilled workforce," he said, adding that this is where the new training institute matters.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said UPI has become the world's largest real-time payment system with monthly transactions exceeding ₹2,400 crore, and that over 59 crore Jan Dhan accounts have been opened. The campus, she said, will build expertise in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data-centre technologies.
RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra and Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi attended.
Modi also used the stage for politics, reviving his "phone banking" charge against the Congress — that loans of thousands of crores went to a select, well-connected few before 2014, pushing banks into an NPA crisis. Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee president Bhakta Charan Das answered with a charge of his own: that digital banking has become an "invisible pickpocketing" of the poor through minimum-balance penalties, ATM fees and transaction charges, and that senior citizens are falling prey to cyber fraud.
Both sides were arguing about the same thing from opposite ends: who the digital rupee actually serves.