‘Indian police not capable of solving hi-tech cyber crimes’

A senior UT police officer on Friday stated that the country's police force was not capable of solving hi-tech cyber crimes. "If we rate the cyber crimes in the country on a scale of 1 to 10, the Indian police forces are only capable of solving the crimes at the scale of 3, or a maximum 4," said the Superintendent of Police (Traffic), Chandigarh, Maneesh Chaudhry while addressing a two-day workshop on cyber crimes at the Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh.

From lack of mandatory computer training during recruitment to lack of international treaties, Chaudhry cited various difficulties faced by the Indian police forces in tracking cyber crimes. The Haryana cadre IPS officer emphasised on the need for trained manpower in the police department. "Old parameters are still followed for recruitment of police officers and there is no criteria for even basic computer literacy," he said before adding that officers are trained on the job to tackle cyber crimes, which are not sufficient to handle major technical offences.

"Today, if you want to register a case of cyber crime, the police station officials will send you to the cyber crime cell as all police stations are not equipped to handle such offences. The recruitment process should be amended to include at least some percentage of officials specially trained for cyber crime. When cyber crime also fails, we require help of the cyber forensic experts," Chaudhry said.

The IPS officer also stressed on the lack of an international framework to tackle cyber crime as another major reason for the police's failure in this field. He added that most of these crimes are committed through service providers in different countries, which makes it difficult to track the criminals. "For instance, a criminal based in Chandigarh, can make use of several easily available options on the Internet and route his cyber-fraud (e.g. a banking fraud) through several servers in China, America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and back to India. The first difficulty is to obtain permission for investigation from the host country, which might take a long time. There are possibilities that they may not provide permission. Further, a team has to be sent to that country to obtain the information, which will lead to much wastage of energy and resources," he said.

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