Cyber security literacy in India is “critically low” with less than 16 per cent of adults being able to perform basic digital security tasks, a new study has revealed. Further, this capability deficit is unevenly distributed across social position, caste and community, which risks creating new layers of digital insecurity.
Cyber security literacy has become a global concern as digital infrastructures expand rapidly, exposing populations to risks associated with fraud, misinformation and data exploitation. India is one of the world’s largest and fastest-digitising societies. In June 2026, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported that the country had 1092.79 million internet subscribers.
“Only 15.7 per cent of adults can perform basic digital security tasks on average across the five National Sample Survey (NSS) indicators, revealing a profound capability deficit at the national scale. This deficit is not evenly distributed. It is systematically structured by social position, with women, scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities, rural residents, the elderly, low-income households and populations in northern and eastern states consistently recording the lowest proficiency,” the study said.
“Expanding digital access — as the Digital India initiative has done — does not automatically expand digital security capability. Without attending to the structural conditions that determine who can use digital access safely, digital transformation risks entrenching rather than dissolving existing inequalities,” the researchers cautioned.
Using nationally representative data from the 79th Round of the National Sample Survey, encompassing 9,70,934 individuals, the analysis mapped cyber security skills across caste, gender, education, age, income and region.
Conducted by researchers at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad, and the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, the study was posted by Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a peer reviewed journal, on July 30.
Stating that only a small minority was able to perform essential security tasks such as configuring privacy settings or verifying online information, the study found that men consistently reported higher proficiency than women — 44.8 per cent of men could search, download, install, and configure software and applications compared to 31.9 per cent of women, 25.4 per cent of men could set up effective security measures such as strong passwords and login attempt notifications against 16.8 per cent of women, and even in evaluative tasks such as verifying the reliability of online information, men outperform women by a margin of 22.9 per cent to 15.2 per cent.
Urban respondents demonstrated substantially higher cyber literacy than rural counterparts — 48 per cent of urban individuals could install and configure software compared to 33.9 per cent of rural individuals and 29.8 per cent urbanites could set up effective security measures, nearly double the 16.7 per cent of ruralites.
The researchers also observed that southern and western states were above the national mean, led by Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Kerala, Gujarat and Telangana because they share a common profile of stronger IT infrastructure, higher educational attainment, greater urbanisation and more developed digital services ecosystems. Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha were the lowest on the scale.
Pointing that that cyber security concerns were once associated primarily with high-income, technologically advanced countries but the rapid diffusion of digital infrastructures and services has extended these challenges to the Global South, the researchers put forth several recommendations which includes embedding cyber security education in school curricula at the secondary level and strengthening policy and legal frameworks.
India’s National Education Policy (2020) provides an existing policy vehicle for integrating digital safety modules into school-level education and its implementation at the state level should explicitly include cyber security literacy as a measurable outcome, they said.
Observing that the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the IT Act provide a legal foundation for digital rights, they said that their effectiveness, however, depends on user awareness. Law enforcement and judicial capacity for cybercrime must be strengthened with particular attention to crimes targeting the elderly.
“Cyber security literacy should be adopted as a formal indicator within national digital inclusion frameworks alongside access and usage metrics, enabling evidence-based monitoring of whether digital transformation is producing secure as well as connected citizens,” the researchers said.
