 Are you a regular customer of Amazon or Flipkart or any other online platform? You use your debit card or credit card to purchase in it. Am I right? What will you do if your card details are stolen by cyberattackers or cybercriminals? Here comes the RBI's measure to prevent this. Yes, it is about tokenization. What is it all about? Do watch this video and know more about it. See, tokenization refers to the replacement of actual card details with an alternative code called the token. Remember, this token will be unique for a combination of card, the token requester and the device. If you can't get what I am saying, let me explain it with a familiar example. I hope you all would have travelled in a metro train. Am I right? So, whenever you travel in a metro train, you will be paying the ticket price for the place where you have to reach. And the ticket provider will code the ticket to your destination. Once you collect the token, you will use it to enter the metro station and exit the metro station. Am I right? This means that you cannot use the coded ticket to any other route except the route that you should travel. Likewise, whenever you buy a thing from an online platform, here you can take Amazon as an example. If you prefer to pay through online, you will be provided with various options like internet banking, UPI and payments through credit card or debit cards. Am I right? And if you choose any of the online payment methods, your card details will be saved by that online platform. This is to ease your future transactions. So, here the platform is saving the details so that you don't have to enter the card details again and again. And here comes the issue. Imagine someone hacks the platform and gets all the credit and debit card details in one click. It's a nightmare. Am I right? See, just now we saw about the topic cyber attack, cyber threat, so on. Am I right? All that can be utilized to collect your credit and debit card details. And as I said, all the amount will be detected without your knowledge itself. So, to solve this issue only, RBI came up with a solution called tokenization. As I said already, tokenization refers to the replacement of actual card details with an alternative code called the token. The token will be unique for a combination of card, the token requester and the device. So, how does tokenization work? Imagine I want my cards to be tokenized. So, what I will do? I will initiate a request to the respective online platform. That is the Amazon. Now, what Amazon will do is, it will forward my request to the respective card network. The card network with my concern proceed to generate token by sending OTP to my registered mobile number and email ID. Once this process is done, then the token will be generated and saved instead of actual details of my card in the platform. So, here what is happening? The platform will know only my token and not my actual card details. And when I visit Amazon again, the token will be there already. I just have to make a click to proceed for payment. This is how tokenization works. Now, here also you may have a doubt. How will this tokenization prevent me from any data theft? See, the answer to this is a very simple one. Earlier I mentioned about a combination with three items, right? That is the card, the token requester and the device. Here the card is mine. The token requester is the Amazon Retail India Private Limited. And the device is the app in which my card details are saved. That is Amazon application. All the three items are very important because the token generated upon request for a specific merchant is unique to a specific card number and is usable only on the particular site or mobile app. That is the token is useless outside of that merchant's ecosystem, just like the metrotoken tickets. So even if a hacker or a scammer gets token number of a person, they could not make indiscriminate use of it. And that is how tokenization prevents me from data theft. So if you ask me really such a measure is required or not, it is very necessary. Because as per the RBI annual report 2021 to 2022, in the financial year 2020, there were 2,677 cases of card fraud reported. And this fraud was done through the internet involving 129 crore. While in the financial year 2021, the number of cases decreased to 2,545. It further increased to 3,596 cases in the financial year 2022 with the amount involved being 155 crore. That is why tokenization is important. Also remember as of now, RBI has made tokenization mandatory only for the use of credit or debit cards online. For offline merchants, users would continue to swipe the cards on the POS mission as per previously existing guidelines. I hope you would have understood what is tokenization. It is not a simple token that you give in the counter and get. It is a virtual token. Here we took an important economic concept and decoded it in detail for your examination purposes. Likewise, if you want to know more economic terms or economic concepts, do follow our Hindu newspaper analysis. And stay updated for your UPSC prelims and main examination. Thank you.