CYBER CRIMES IN INDIA

Mobile Phone and internet was was introduced in India on the same day, August 15, 1995. Since then the growth was enviably fast. In May 2012 there were 927.37 million mobile users in India. In 2015 India had the second largest telecom network in the world.

Communication technology has in fact deeply involved in every aspect of human life today. Mobile Phone has entered into email contacts the world over with wide social networking. Banking transactions, health check up, school and college education, office work etc have confined to internet through mobile phone. While we happily looked at the outstanding performance of this sector, we failed to take adequate security measures in this field. According to NCRB reports there are considerable increase of cyber crimes in India. When it was 27,248 cyber crimes in 2018, it came to 44,546 in 2019 and 50,035 in 2020. Most of these cases are related banking fraud and bullying of women and children.

The most significant aspect of cyber crimes is that a good number of people, especially from some north Indian states, are ignorant about this modern methods of cheating. In some bank fraud cases, the money transactions had taken place through the bank accounts of some innocent people from these states. Though Government of India have introduced the IT Act in 2000, it could prevent the misuse effectively. A report by The Hindu dated March 9, 2021 says that a total of over 3.17 lakhs cyber crimes and 5,771 FIRs were registered online through centralised portal in the last 18 months. Another report by the Indian Express dated 27 September 2021 says that Rs 58.97 lakhs lost in online frauds recovered by cyber police. In 2020 till June, Mumbai police lodged 1,097 cyber crime cases but only 80 were detected (7.29%), while this year till June, 1,277 cases were registered and 136 were detected (10.64%)

In most cases cyber criminals are escaped with the duped sum leaving no trace for the police. As the number of cyber cases are increasing in the country considerably the government may take adequate steps to prevent the cases as much as possible. Two steps are suggested below in this direction; one is a short term action plan and another is a long term one.

In  the short term plan, the government may try to formulate a law and enforce it strictly that no one should be allowed to use more than one SIM card for mobile phone. All the required particulars about a person should be contained in this card and should hold utmost secrecy and accessible to the government. Since freely available SIM cards are the prime cause for cyber crimes, this restriction may bring good results. And the long-term one is, to include all about cyber crimes in the syllabus from class 4 to 12. This will help the coming generation to be more vigilant in this matter.

K V George