NEW DELHI: The Parliament was told today that the home ministry is executing a project on Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children (CCPWC), which will also act as specialised central institutional mechanism for online cyber crime reporting platform particularly cyber crime against women and children.
Minister of state for electronics and information technology P P Chaudhary said that no study had been done the point made by the questioner about rampant misuse of social media by paedophiles and sex offenders to intimidate and harass women and children.
However, the minister said the data maintained by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) showed a total of 749 and 792 cases were registered under publishing or transmitting of material containing sexually explicit act, etc. in electronic form (section 67 & 67A IT of Act) and a total of 5 and 8 cases were registered under publishing or transmitting of material depicting children in sexually explicit act, etc. in electronic form (section 67B IT of Act) during 2014-2015.
In addition, a total of 40 cases in 2014 and 94 cases in 2015 were registered under Sections 14 & 15 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012.
He said cyber world is anonymous and universally available. Most of the child pornographic websites are hosted from outside India. INTERPOL maintains and updates list of “worst of list” on extreme child sexual abuse.
The Government periodically blocks this list shared by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as the national crime bureau of INTERPOL. More than 3000 such websites/URLs have been blocked so far.
Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 has provisions for removal of objectionable online content. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2011 notified under section 79 of the IT Act require that the Intermediaries shall observe due diligence while discharging their duties and shall inform the users of computer resources not to host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, update or share any information that is harmful, objectionable, affect minors and unlawful in any way.
The Government is in regular touch with intermediaries including various social media websites to effectively address the blocking/removal of objectionable content. Further, Social Networking sites hosted anywhere in the world are monitored by the law enforcement agencies in order to check / remove objectionable contents from the web sites in accordance with the provisions of IT Act, 2000.
