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Incidents of cyber-crime low, officials tells House panel
Lawmakers urge stronger measures against cyber-crime, emphasizing financial literacy in rural areas, despite officials claiming low fraud rates.
Government officials have claimed in a Parliamentary panel meeting that incidents of cyber-crime are low although lawmakers were not entirely convinced and sought new measures, stronger laws and more focus in rural areas where financial literacy and awareness campaigns are limited, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named.
In the home affairs panel meeting, the Union finance ministry’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) told the lawmakers that for every ₹10,000 of transaction only 9 paisa is fraud—which is a very “low level” . But MPs, cutting across party lines argued that government agencies must strengthen their financial and digital literacy drive in rural areas where a vast section of the population receives government aid digitally through direct benefits transfer.
According to one of the people cited above, a government official, TDP’s Krishna Prasad Tenneti and others raised the issue of the vulnerable population and pointed out that at least 65% of the Indian population lives in rural areas. While appreciating DBT (direct benefits transfer), the lawmakers, the official added, pointed to the importance of educating people on being safe online. ASP KR lawmaker Chandra Shekhar, Congress’ Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, and BJP’s Soumitra Khan were among the other members who spoke about the same issue. Some lawmakers argued that parking proceeds of cybercrime abroad is a matter of national concern.
According to the NCRB data, 50035, 52974 and 65893 cyber crime cases were registered across the country in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively. The NCRB has not released its data since then.
The officials informed the lawmakers that on June 30, the Reserve Bank of India asked all Scheduled Commercial Banks, Small Finance Banks, Payments Banks, and Co-operative Banks to integrate the Financial Fraud Risk Indicator (FRI) developed by DoT into their systems. This is a risk-based metric that classifies a mobile number to have been associated with Medium, High, or Very High risk of financial fraud, according to a government press release issued on Wednesday.
In 2023, a RBI report to the standing committee on finance had said that a number of steps including a threshold for transactions in new accounts, a Central ‘negative registry’ of the accounts of known fraudsters and a standard operating procedure to stop the downstream flow of funds once a fraud is reported have been suggested by Indian banks to stop online frauds.
The two-day meeting on “Cyber Crime - Ramifications, Protection and Prevention” of the parliamentary standing committee on home affairs started here on Wednesday. Officials from Department of Financial Services, Public and Private banks, Department of Telecommunications Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY); and Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), MeitY briefed the MPs. The panel is headed by BJP’s Radha Mohan Das Agrawal.
On Thursday, the panel invited external affairs ministry officials, and CBI and NIA officials to discuss the issue.
The Ministry of Home Affairs has set up the ‘Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre’ (I4C) to deal with all types of cyber crime in the country, in a coordinated and comprehensive manner.
