Freedom from fraud: How Haryana built cyber shield

As India marks its 79th Independence Day, freedom today carries a meaning our founding generation could not have imagined: the freedom to transact, to be heard, to be governed, and to be protected all through a screen.

Seventy-nine years ago, independence gave us freedom from colonial rule and slavery; freedom meant the right to life, equality, the vote, to speak, to own property free from arbitrary seizure. Today, technology has expanded that freedom further; access to the internet is now widely seen as bound up with our fundamental rights.

An equally intimate freedom has entered our lives: the freedom to access services without standing in long queues, without a harsh, impersonal interface standing between citizen and state. This is the quiet revolution technology has authored in the life of the ordinary citizen, whose day now runs on a digital screen more than most of us pause to notice.

Policing, too, has not remained untouched. Over three decades in the Indian Police Service, I have witnessed policing reinvent itself five times to keep pace with technology and the society it serves. Before 1995, policing relied on older, more intrusive methods; today we are far more accountable. Windows 95 and the arrival of the internet in 1998 brought mobile telephony and mobile-based crime into public life. From 2009, touch-screen smartphones and app-based mapping reshaped both crime and policing. After 2021 came drones and early Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. Today, everyone is talking about AI, and various departments across the country are investing heavily in it; by 2030, policing may well be drone- and robot-assisted. Policing and New Criminal Laws has not stood apart from this transformation; it has become one of its most active adopters. FIRs are now filed online, court records move through the Interoperable Criminal Justice System, and forensic reports, once locked away for months, are increasingly digitised for faster trial outcomes. Under PM Narendra Modi’s supervision of the Pragati Portal, Haryana Police's IT initiatives have carried this reform forward with the rollout of e-Zero FIR from 25 June 2026, letting citizens register serious offences instantly, without the old anxieties of jurisdiction or delay. Tools that once belonged only to banks and telecom firms are now instruments of criminal justice reform.

It is fitting, then, that this year Haryana became the leading state in the country in cybercrime control. This distinction says as much about how far our digital lives have travelled as about how far our policing has had to travel with them. Of the 14,731 cybercrime cases Haryana Police received till 22 July 2026, restoration orders were issued to victims in 38 per cent of cases, against a national average of just 8 per cent. That single statistic is, in many ways, this Independence Day's quiet story: a state using the same technology that enables fraud also to enable justice.

Convenience carries its shadow, and nowhere is this more visible than in the surge of cyber fraud riding the very infrastructure built for ease. Digital arrest fraud alone accounted for as many as 1,23,000 reported cases nationally in 2024, with losses of Rs 1,935 crore — nearly triple what was lost in 2022. Across the country in all forms of digital fraud, more than Rs 54,000 crore was reported lost between April 2021 and November 2025. In Haryana, the first quarter of 2026 alone saw digital arrest scams cost citizens Rs 10.78 crore, with customers of HDFC Bank, Bank of Baroda and SBI among the worst hit. In one Gurugram case, a victim was kept on video call for ten consecutive days while Rs 79 lakh moved silently across forty mule accounts. These are not isolated incidents, but the work of organised, often international networks and investigations have traced links to Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Vietnam and China, with scam centres coercing trafficked youth into what can only be called cyber slavery.

Building the shield

The change of minister can’t stop railway accidents, paper leaks, riots, etc. Terrorism was fought with guns and bullets. Similarly, Cybercrime can only be completely cured by switching off the internet, and that is not possible for any nation to do. If technology created this vulnerability, Haryana Police's response has been to fight fire with fire, building a shield out of the same digital architecture, rather than chasing the fire after it spreads. The Money Restoration Module has already released Rs 2.51 crore back to victims, treating financial recovery not as an afterthought but as a core policing function. Cybercrime rarely respects state boundaries, which is why inter-state coordination is central to the response: of 9,437 assistance requests received from other states, Haryana Police disposed of 9,156, a 97 per cent response rate few states can match. Alongside this, 15,853 fraud-linked URLs were taken down between 1 January and 22 July 2026, choking the scam infrastructure at its source. For senior citizens specifically, Haryana has gone further, becoming the first state in India to introduce dual-OTP authentication for their fund transfers. For transfers of Rs 1 lakh or more, a second OTP now goes to both the account holder and a trusted family member, so funds move only when both codes are entered — a simple, transformative check already stalling large fraudulent transfers before completion. Enrolment is currently voluntary for those above 60, with mandatory enrolment for those above 75 under consideration.

There is something worth reflecting on this Independence Day: the same UPI code on a vendor's cart, the same portal that files a grievance, and the same phone that once made an elderly citizen a target can now also be the instrument of their protection. Technology has not simply changed how we live — it has changed what freedom itself must now guarantee. The freedom to transact must come with freedom from fraud; the freedom to be governed digitally must come with the freedom to trust that governance. This commitment is part of Haryana Vision 2047, personally monitored by Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini. Haryana Police has set up a dedicated wing to address them, and is building an Integrated Command Centre and a State Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (S4C) to tackle cybercrime and its evolving effects. As India completes 79 years of independence, the task is no longer only to connect every citizen to technology, but to ensure that no citizen's safety and trust is left unprotected within it. This Independence Day, we pledge to ensure a new Fundamental Right for the citizens of India: access to the safe and secure internet.

The writer is Director General of Police, Haryana; Views presented are personal.