Convenience Must Never Come Before Human Security.
Every rupee saved by an ordinary citizen represents years of hard work, sacrifice, patience, and hope.
For a poor or middle-class family, savings are not just money.
They are a child's education... a daughter's marriage... a family's dream home... or the security of old age.
No technological innovation should ever place these lifetime savings at unnecessary risk.
During the era when banking was primarily physical, reported losses from bank robberies and major financial frauds were relatively limited. Around the year 2000, publicly discussed estimates often placed annual losses from such incidents in the range of ₹500 to ₹1,500 crore, with many cases involving a relatively small number of large frauds affecting banks or corporate entities.
Today, the situation appears fundamentally different.
Recent public reports estimate that cyber-enabled financial frauds in India have reached well over ₹1 lakh crore within just a few years.
More importantly, the nature of the victims has changed.
Earlier, large financial crimes often involved a relatively small number of corporations or influential individuals.
Today, the victims are increasingly ordinary citizens.
Teachers...
Retired pensioners...
Students...
Housewives...
Daily wage workers...
Small business owners...
Middle-class families...
Instead of one massive fraud affecting a few organisations, modern cybercrime frequently involves hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of individual victims, each losing amounts ranging from a few thousand rupees to several lakhs.
These are not merely financial statistics.
These are people's lives.
Their lifetime savings.
Their dreams.
Their future.
Technology has undoubtedly made financial transactions faster.
But speed alone should never be mistaken for progress.
If convenience comes at the cost of exposing millions of ordinary citizens to increasingly sophisticated cybercrime, society has a moral responsibility to ask difficult questions.
Progress should never mean transferring greater risk to innocent people.
Many governments and financial institutions encourage digital payments because they improve efficiency and reduce transaction costs.
Those are legitimate objectives.
However, efficiency can never become more important than protecting citizens.
When cybercriminals operating from distant locations—or even across national borders—can steal the life savings of ordinary families within minutes, the response cannot simply be:
"Please be more careful."
Security cannot remain the customer's responsibility alone.
The responsibility must equally belong to governments, regulators, banks, payment companies, and technology platforms that design and promote these systems.
A financial system should not be judged merely by the number of digital transactions it processes.
It should be judged by a far more important question:
How effectively does it protect the savings of ordinary people?
Citizens should never be forced into financial systems without meaningful protection.
People deserve genuine choice.
Those who prefer digital banking should certainly have that option.
Likewise, those who wish to rely more heavily on physical cash and traditional banking methods should not be left without practical alternatives.
The measure of civilization is not how advanced its technology appears.
It is how well it protects its most vulnerable citizens.
Innovation is valuable.
Convenience is useful.
But neither should ever become more important than the safety of a family's lifetime savings.
A society that cannot adequately protect the honest earnings of its ordinary people should pause, reflect, and redesign its financial systems before calling them progress.
-Yozen Balki 🌿
கருத்துகள் இல்லை:
கருத்துரையிடுக
You can give here your comments: