Union Minister for Home and Cooperation Amit Shah said it is not possible today to imagine India’s development without cyber safety and if we do not ensure cyber security, then our own strength will become a big challenge for us.
Addressing the National Conference on Cyber Safety and National Security (Azadi from Cyber Crime – Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav) in New Delhi, he said that today public awareness is the most important pillar in the vision of a Cyber Safe India because without awareness it cannot be used.
Before 2014, he recalled that one could not have imagined this because there were crores of people who did not have bank accounts. Now, in 8 years, there is not a single family that does not have a bank account and the benefits of government schemes reach them online. Rs.6,000 reaches accounts of 13 crore farmers annually.
He said that misuse of cyber space is not a new thing. Be it malware attacks, phishing, attacks on critical infrastructure, data thefts, online frauds, child pornography, many challenges are there. In 2012, cyber crimes reported were 3,377 and in 2020 the figure has reached 50,000, 136 cyber crime cases were registered every day in 2020, the number of cyber crimes per one lakh population also increased by 270 percent in four years.
In 2016 the figure was one and in 2020 it increased to 3.7. This shows how big a challenge this growth is going to be in the coming times. The cybercrime reporting portal was launched three years ago on which more than 11 lakh complaints of different types have been registered so far. More than two lakh complaints of social media crimes have also been registered.
This volume is going to increase day by day as today 800 million Indians have an online presence in India, by 2025 another 400 million Indians will enter the digital world, there has been a 231 percent increase in internet connections in the last 8 years. In the last 8 years, our data cost per GB has come down by about 96 percent which is expected to come down further as when users increase data becomes cheaper.
