<![CDATA[On August 15 the Maharashtra Police announced the commissioning of cyber laboratories in around 34 Police Commissionerates in the state to deal with the rising menace of cybercrime, besides providing a boost to all technical aspects of crime investigation. Setting up of 34 cyber laboratories was just the beginning of the government’s efforts to crack down on rising cyber-crime in the state, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said. The number of labs will be increased to 51 by December this year, he said. “While we are trying hard to bring all of Mumbai under camera surveillance, having these labs will ensure that we have an upper hand in tackling crimes.” The government, he said, is already in the process of setting up a dedicated cyber police force and is training 1,000 personnel for this. The CM added, “This is a historical step to make our police force competent and on par with the best in the world”. Police officials said this was only the first phase of the initiative to make the police force better equipped to deal with the forensic aspects of crime investigation and prevention. ‘’When we were sizing up the project, we checked the needs of Police Commissionerates in the remotest corners of the state. We found that not only cyber-crime cases, even general crimes need a lot of electronic evidence. It was also found that in nearly 50 per cent of cases, the investigation hits a roadblock due to factors like poor quality of CCTV footage, [difficulties in] data recovery from storage devices, and analysis of data. In the first phase, the cyber labs have been equipped with tools for technology assisted investigation”, IGP (Cyber) Brijesh Singh said. ]]>
