With significant underreporting of cyber crime related offences, the Union Home Ministry has urged the States to create necessary technical infrastructure, including establishment of adequate number of cyber police stations and post technically trained manpower for detection, registration, investigation and prosecution of such cases.
“There is an urgent need for setting up cyber police stations with cyber lab and a Central Training lab. States/Union Territories are urged to set up facilities for training of law enforcement officers for tackling cyber crime. Significant progress has not been made by the concerned State/UT administrations to tackle cyber crime,” the Union Home Ministry said in a note to the States and UTs.
The Ministry had issued a detailed advisory to all the Chief Secretaries/Home Secretaries/DGPs on January 4 and July 16 for preventing and combating cyber crime against children and tackling cyber crimes.
The Ministry has advised the States to train the law enforcement agencies (police, prosecution and judiciary) through special training programmes/seminars. The Centre has also advised the State police forces to carry out undercover cyber patrol operations to identify Internet criminals, employ decoys and arrest them. The Ministry has also asked the States to counteract operations that target intellectual property, endangering national security and competitiveness and dismantle national and transnational organised criminal enterprises engaged in crimes/frauds on the Internet.
The Centre has assured the States that department of IT, CBI, CERT-IN, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and CFSls will supplement the initiatives taken for tackling cyber crimes.
According to the National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) data, cases registered and persons arrested under IT Act and IPC sections under various cyber crimes during 2009-11 have increased. The NCRB data says the overall crime rate of cyber offences has increased from 400 cases in 2009 to 1,791 cases in 2011 under the IT Act. Under the IPC provisions, the cases have increased from 276 in 2009 to 422 in 2011.
Statistics from Department of Information Technology suggest there are 140 million of Internet users in the country. The annual growth rate of Internet users in the country is 30 per cent with an Internet penetration of 12 per cent. The overall software export of India in 2011-12 was in the range of $68.7 billion.
“These statistics reflect the magnitude of the Internet users and spurt in the information and technology in the country. In spite of having such a large number of mobile devices and Internet connections, the crimes being reported are probably only a fraction of the reality which indicates that serious underreporting is taking place. The number of cyber crimes will see a rise and this needs to be addressed by the States by taking speedy counter measures,” said the Ministry in its note to the States.
Cyber crimes relate to the offences where a computer is the target or is the means adopted to commit it. The Ministry said these are emerging crimes in India and are rapidly increasing due to extensive use of information technology.
Major types of cyber crimes include cyber stalking, hacking, computer espionage, computer sabotage, intellectual property crimes, infringement of privacy, identity theft, piracy, pornography/obscenity, data interception, data modification, data theft, network interference, denial of service, aiding and abetting, computer-related forgery, cyber fraud and source code attacks among others.