NEW DELHI, Feb 11: The Union Home Minister Amit Shah informed a Parliamentary Committee on Tuesday that 805 mobile applications and 3,266 website links have been blocked so far due to “national security” reasons.
The Minister stated that a total of 1.43 lakh First Information Reports (FIRs) have been registered on the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) portal, and over 19 crore people have used the website cybercrime.gov.in.
Mr Shah said over 6 lakh suspicious data points have been shared through a common system linking 14C, police, banks, and other law enforcement agencies and more than 19 lakh mule bank accounts have been identified preventing suspicious transactions worth ₹2,038 crore. A total of 399 banks and financial intermediaries are linked to the platform.
Mr Shah was chairing a meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Home Affairs on the topic of ‘Cyber Security and Cyber Crime.’ Addressing the meeting, Mr Shah said India has witnessed a ‘digital revolution’ in the last decade. There has been an expansion of digital infrastructure in India in recent years, the Minister said, which has naturally led to an increase in the number of cyber attacks.
He said looking at cyberspace from a different perspective, it forms a complex network of ‘software,’ ‘services,’ and ‘users.’ He emphasised that until we consider controlling cyber fraud through ‘software,’ ‘services,’ and ‘users,’ it will be impossible to resolve the issues of cyberspace. He said cybercrime transcends geographical boundaries. He stated that it was a ‘borderless’ and ‘formless’ crime, as it has no limits or fixed form.
Mr Shah said 95% villages in the country were digitally connected, and 1 lakh gram panchayats were equipped with Wi-Fi hotspots. In the past ten years, the number of Internet users has increased by 4.5 times. He mentioned that in 2024, a total of 246 trillion transactions worth ₹17. 221 lakh crore were made through UPI. In 2024, as high as 48% of the global digital transactions took place in India. He also said in terms of the start-up ecosystem, India has become the third-largest country in the world. In 2023, the contribution of the digital economy to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was around ₹32 lakh crore, which is 12%, and nearly 15 million jobs were created.
The digital economy contributes 20% to the total economy of India. He also mentioned that the goal of the Ministry of Home Affairs was to ensure zero cybercrime cases and their FIRs.
He said a healthy tradition of exchange of information between the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Electronics and IT, CERT-IN, I4C, and departments like Telecom and Banking has led to successfully tackling many cases of cybercrime.
The Minister said efforts were underway to use artificial intelligence for identifying mule accounts, in coordination with the Reserve Bank of India and other banks, to establish a system for their detection. He mentioned that the government will ensure the closure of mule accounts before they are even operational.
(Manas Dasgupta)
