Taking a major step towards ensuring cyber security, Home Minister Amit Shah has announced several new initiatives, including training 5,000 ‘cyber commandos’, setting up a web-based data registry as well as a portal to share cyber crime information, and a national registry of suspects to prevent future crimes. The home minister said cybercrimes see “no boundaries” and national security is impossible without cyber security.
Speaking at the first foundation day celebration of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) in New Delhi on Tuesday, Mr Shah also announced the formation of a Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC) with representatives of major banks, financial intermediaries, payment aggregators, telecom service providers, IT Intermediaries and law enforcement agencies from states and Union Territories.
All these agencies will work together for immediate action and seamless cooperation to tackle online financial crimes. The CFMC, the minister said, is expected to serve as an example of “cooperative federalism” in law enforcement.
The Union Home Minister said the formation of seven joint cyber coordination teams at Mewat, Jamtara, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Visakhapatnam and Guwahati has yielded good results and I4C has launched an effective awareness campaign on various social media handles under the CyberDost initiative.
“To achieve our goal, we will have to make a precise strategy and move forward together in the same direction,” he said.
The Samanvay Platform, which is a Joint Cybercrime Investigation Facilitation System, is a step towards this. It is a web-based module that will act as a one-stop portal, acting as a data repository of cybercrime and a platform for data sharing, crime mapping, data analytics, cooperation and coordination.
Training Commandos
Under the ‘Cyber Commandos’ programme, a special wing of trained personnel in states/UTs and central police organisations like the CBI will be established to counter threats to the cyber security landscape in the country. The trained cyber commandos are expected to assist states and central agencies in securing the digital space.
There will also be a registry of suspects that is being created based on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) – in collaboration with banks and financial intermediaries – to strengthen the fraud risk management capabilities of India’s financial ecosystem.
The home minister pointed out that 46% of global digital transactions occur in India and pointed out that the number of internet users in the country has increased from 25 crore on March 31 2014 to 95 crore on March 31 2024. He said that data consumption has also gone up almost 78 times to 20.27 GB from 0.26 GB due to the increase in downloading speed and a reduction in cost.
The Digitial India initiative, he said, has ensured that many facilities have gone online, adding that transactions worth Rs 20.64 lakh crore have been done digitally in 2024.
The I4C has, so far, issued over 600 advisories and blocked websites, social media pages, mobile apps and accounts used by cybercriminals.
