Parliamentary panel expresses concern over increasing cyber crimes

New Delhi, Feb 15: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has raised concerns over the rising number of cyber crimes in the country in its latest report submitted on February 10 in Parliament.

The Committee, headed by the Congress lawmaker Anand Sharma, said, quoting the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB)data, that the cyber crime cases have increased from 27,248 in 2018 to 50,035 in 2020 mainly related to financial transactions.

"The criminals not only target the innocent and vulnerable, especially elderly people, and dupe them of their savings but also well-known persons and celebrities," the panel said, adding that specialised training was required to deal with the increasing cyber crimes in the country.

The Committee also recommended that the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy (SVPNPA), North Eastern Police Academy (NEPA) should coordinate with the state training academies to train police personnel with requisite knowledge of cyber laws, cyber crime investigation, digital forensics and upgrade them from time to time on new technological tools to deal with cyber crimes. The training academies may be advised to recruit cyber experts as trainers on cyber technologies.

Noting that with an advancement of technology, cyber crimes have emerged as a major issue all across the globe and transcend geographical boundaries making it tough to track criminals, the panel expressed its deep concerns over the rising trend of cybercrimes in the country.

The panel also observed that traditional training of the police personnel was not sufficient to deal with cyber crimes as these criminals are tech-savvy and are following new modus-operandi on a regular basis, the MHA officials informed the panel that to strengthen training on the cyber crime investigation, a specialised centre of SVPNPA, namely National Digital Crime Resource & Training Centre (NDCRTC), set up in 2015, provides training in cyber crime investigation and cyber security to all law enforcement officers across the country.

"Some of the courses conducted by NDCRTC encompass the areas of disk forensics, mobile forensics and call detail record analysis, windows forensics, internet-based crimes, network forensics, dark web, open-source intelligence, block chain, social media analysis and investigation of digital payment frauds. NDCRTC has conducted over 290 physical courses and trained more than 8800 officers in the last five years from more than 24 organizations," the MHA informed the panel.

The MHA also informed the committee that the National Police Academy has the capacity to train around 200 officers at most in a year while the Central Detective and Training Institute (CDTI) and the Bureau of Police Research and Development (PR&D) have another modest initiative, mainly for ranks of sub-inspectors and inspectors.

The committee also recommended that the MHA may allocate adequate funds and extend necessary resources for the establishment of cyber training labs and strengthening, upgrading of existing cyber training infrastructure in all the states and union territories.