Parl panel recommends more refresher courses for LEAs to control cybercrime

New Delhi: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs has recently recommended more refresher courses for all Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in a bid to effectively monitor and stop cybercrime in the country.

The Standing Committee's 233rd report on action taken by the Indian government on cybercrimes was presented in the recently concluded Monsoon Session of Parliament, on August 10.

In its report, the Standing Committee observed that the nature of crimes was evolving and changing on a daily basis due to technological advancement.

"It is, therefore, important for the Centre to have coordination with the states/Union Territories (UTs) for optimal utilisation of existing resources. The existing national-level training centre at Dwarka, New Delhi, established by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) must be used to provide short and long-term training and refresher courses periodically to all senior officers of the states/UTs involved in monitoring and handling cybercrimes in their respective states/UTs" said the report.

The MHA informed the committee that the National Level Training Centre (NCTC) under the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) headquarters at Mahipalpur in New Delhi has been conducting short and long-term training and refresher courses periodically for all LEAs.

Till now nearly 13,000 police personnel, judicial officers and prosecutors have been provided training on cybercrime awareness, investigation and forensics. The panel observed that still many of the states/UTs have not come on board for the purpose.

Therefore, the panel advises on providing training to more personnel so that they are well-trained to deal with increasing cybercrimes and speed up the completion of pending activities in a time-bound manner to achieve the physical and financial targets under the Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children (CCPWC).

The MHA informed that in order to provide cybercrime investigation-related training under the I4C scheme to a large number of stakeholders, including police officers, judicial officers/prosecutors and forensic experts, NCRB has launched a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform -- CyTrain portal (https://cytrain.ncrb.gov.in) on March 12, 2020.

"It offers professional quality e-learning resources on cybercrime investigation. In order to access the courses available on the portal, users can simply register using an email-id of government domain such as nic. in and gov. in. In case of unavailability of government email-id, an offline procedure has also been provided", the MHA said.

The Union Home Ministry has set up an Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) to provide a framework and ecosystem to deal with cybercrimes in a coordinated and comprehensive manner.

"The I4C will aim at strengthening the capability of LEAs and improve coordination among various agencies and LEAs. It will work towards enhancing the nation's technical capability to tackle cybercrimes and develop an effective operational architecture for coordinating with various LEAs related to cybercrime, the MHA added.