Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has approved the setting up of a five-member expert group to tackle cyber crime, which has seen an increase of about 40 per cent annually over the past few years.
“India with a fast growing economy is susceptible to international and domestic cyber attacks and there is need to ensure a cyber crime-free environment,” a Home Ministry statement said on Wednesday.
The members of the expert group will be CDAC (Pune) Director-General Rajat Moona, Professor Krishnan of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, CERT-In Director-General Gulshan Rai, Manindra Aggarwal of IIT-Kanpur and D. Dass of IIIT-Bengaluru. Joint Secretary (Centre-State) Kumar Alok will be the convener of the group. The group will prepare a road map for effectively tackling cyber crime and give suitable recommendations on possible partnerships with the public and private sectors.
Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal told The Hindu that the group could have field experts for professional inputs and representatives from law enforcement agencies to ensure a holistic study.
“The Information Technology Act is long outdated. The 2008 amendments, making a range of offences bailable, have severely impacted the conviction rate,” he said. This needs to be addressed. Also, the recent Supreme Court judgment in Anvar Vs P.K. Basheer on evidentiary admissibility of contents of electronic records is also to be taken into account to strengthen ways for gathering evidence. Then there is also the issue of international cooperation,” Mr. Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate, said.
“Cyber crime is a constantly moving target. With the emerging new crimes, capacity building is a huge challenge. We have to go beyond traditional crimes to include offences such as cyber terrorism, warfare and cyber Naxalism,” said Mr. Duggal, adding that laws needed to be made more stringent.
Stating that India was yet to formulate a policy on how to deal with cyber terrorism indoctrination, the cyber law expert pointed out that Section 66F of the IT Act that prescribed life sentence for cyber terrorism was introduced in 2008.
(With inputs by Devesh K. Pandey)
