Fist is actively supporting the National Cyber Safety Initiative of the Mumbai Police along with other associated bodies like NASSCOM, FICCI, IMC, AIAI, and BCA. The activities in the pipeline are:

Under this initiative, policemen trained in the area of CS could visit housing societies regularly and try and spread CS awareness amongst the residents of the society. Each of the 84 police stations of Mumbai will conduct such meetings with two housing societies in their area each week. The meetings would be conducted in English, Hindi and Marathi and will seek to educate the residents about safety measures on the internet by discussing issues such as on-line payments, credit card frauds, offensive content, child pornography and so on.

Reports of such visits will be filed with a central office that could make such reports public through a NCSI (National Cyber Safety Initiative) web site to encourage policemen to be diligent about their visits.

Additional CP and DCPs will go to the societies. Supporting organization such as NASSCOM, FIST and so on will help with the preparation of the collateral and give to the officers for use at the society meetings.

Under this initiative companies in the technology sector will espouse a cause and then carry on the work around this cause all year round. FIST has a mechanism of creating special interest groups. Each FIST SIG would espouse a cause, get sponsors and corporate entities for support. Some of the activities planned under this initiative are money laundering, biometrics, video surveillance and so on.

Each person espousing a cause will present his / her exact plan of action for the entire year in advance. Plans will include training and awareness programs for general public, policemen and other stake holders, publications, films and documentaries, seminars and conferences and so on.

A series of catchy presentations will be made for screening just before the start of movies in cinema halls. This would take CS awareness to a new level in the society.

These slides will be shown in each movie auditorium in Mumbai just before the start of the movie. It will reach hundreds of thousands of citizen’s everyday.

Under this initiative we will devise academic programs for policemen. Amongst other things, the curriculum will be designed to also make cyber investigators out of interested policemen. The program would be medium term duration (2 – 3 months) and will be delivered through a remote delivery mechanism.

The transmission studio (sound proof room with unlinking facilities) will be at the Mumbai Cyber Labs and MTNL or similar broad band connectivity will be used to deliver the programs to the students.

The students will be policemen who will take these classes from their respective police stations. For this purpose, each police station will be furnished with at least one multimedia-enabled, internet connected PC.

Programs to be conducted under this initiative will cover many aspects of policing and not necessarily cyber crime only.

If other regions of Maharastra / India also equip themselves with similar facilities, officers from those areas can also benefit from the training.

For policemen who may not want to join a year-long training program, there will be an IPS cyber club. Here IPS officers would be invited for an evening of discussion each month where technology experts could talk on various issues. This would be a program with a published calendar.

Issues such as identity theft affect banks and airlines the most. The CSI will include seminars on such topics. The invitees could be CTOs from banks, financial institutions, airlines and so on.

Similar activities could be held each month. These meetings will be held at 2 or 3 fixed locations alternately so that once the meeting is held in the southern part of Mumbai, once in the northern part and so on.

There will be a cyber adalat every fortnight where general public can come and present their problems to a panel of experts. Aggrieved parties can make a physical appearance or can interact among themselves using technologies such as VoIP, email, video-conferencing and so on.

Policemen will need a lot of help initially in tackling technology crimes. They should ideally read the standard operating procedure manuals that we intend to create as part of this initiative. But practically these manuals will become more of reference books and not teaching aids.

We can therefore create better teaching aids for the police. These teaching aids may be most effective if they are in the form of videos.

For this purpose we intend to create a number of videos along the lines of “Nat-Geo Investigates”.

IN addition to such instructions films, we will also make short documentaries for public awareness. These will be shown in TV channels and also in movie theatres before the start of the films.