During the Budget Session 2026–27, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Empowerment of Women tabled the Fourth Report on Cyber Crimes and Cyber Safety of Women. The report identifies several facets of cybercrime ecosystem afflicting women in India, probes gaps in policy, and makes corresponding recommendations.
A primary concern with the report is the absence of cohesive and reliable public datasets. To begin with, the report systematically underrepresents tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TF-GBV). TF-GBV is defined by the United Nations Population Fund as, “an act of violence that is committed, assisted, aggravated and amplified in part or fully by the use of information and communication technologies or digital media against a person on the basis of gender.”
The report data over-indexes financial cybercrime. A staggering 72.6 percent of the total 1,01,928 offences reported in 2024 having been recorded as either banking or investment fraud, even higher than the 65 percent recorded in 2023. Cases of online sexual exploitation account for a meagre 3.1 percent. This is because the classification of cybercrime privileges economic harm over relational and reputational harm. TF-GBV is located in this cross-section. Gendered harm in the online realm seldom has to do with financial loss alone; it is more a function of harassment, humiliation, and denigration.
Second, emerging harms like AI-generated deepfakes, doxxing, and targeted misogyny find no settled classification at all.
Additionally, with the transition from the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), it is difficult to trace a year-on-year comparison of how the crimes are reported. Many cyber offences against women which were earlier charged under legacy IPC sections do not map cleanly onto BNS parallels due to several rearrangements and compressions in the text. Moreover, the Principle Offence Rule further obscures digital harms through definitional obscuring, meaning that composite crimes that have both online and offline elements (such as cyber stalking leading to murder) are compressed and collapsed into a single data point representing only the most serious harm (for example, murder, with the cyber stalking element lost in translation).
These factors are by no means exhaustive, but merely indicative of a massive under-counting in National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data, which is presumed to be the de factojumping off point for official analyses of the volume and nature of cybercrimes against women. This inadequate data is then used to chart out mitigation pathways, leading to a potential problem–solution mismatch.
The murky territory of under-reporting
In its submission to the committee, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) acknowledged that, “despite the availability of the National Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) and the 1930 helpline, women may be facing challenges in reporting cyber crime.” These instruments were introduced to ease the process of reporting cybercrime, with a focus on TF-GBV and financial fraud respectively. Reducing the dependence on direct police interface can be both cumbersome and daunting. The report does not, however, allude to a very curious unforeseen consequence of these tools.
Out of a total of 82 lakh portal complaints, an infinitesimal 2.2 percent had been converted into FIRs as of December 2025. It is clear that citizens, including women, are using these tools for reporting. However, these complaints are still disappearing from the official record because, once filed, they fall through the cracks of FIR drafting, chargesheeting, and subsequent law enforcement processes that disincentivise reporting and cause under-counting in the first place. In 2025, the government announced the e-Zero FIR pilot in Delhi, which would auto-convert NCRP complaints into FIRs. However, this was limited to financial fraud cases with a threshold of more than INR 10 lakh.
At the same time, even portal complaints represent only a subset of actual incidents, excluding those who cannot reach the portal at all.
MHA identifies four primary reasons for under-reporting of TF-GBV through the portal’s alternative channel, particularly in rural and semi-urban areas: limited awareness, limited access to mobile/internet, low digital literacy, and language gaps. Each of these factors deserves attention if we are to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of women’s digital realities in India.
There is no awareness without good data
Campaigns and literacy drives about cyber safety are not being targeted to the regions and communities where awareness is lowest. Government assessments gauge success by the number of campaigns and people reached, not by behavioural change or reporting uptake.
The report does not shine light on what data, if any, is being used to identify low-awareness hotpots and target campaigns accordingly. The MHA claims that its Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) is integrating metrics from the portal, feedback mechanisms from public events, and the CyberDost social media handle to assess the impactof ongoing efforts. This data is not available in the public domain. More importantly, it is unclear how a post-facto impact analysis of the campaigns on user awareness, measured through reporting data, could shine the light on preexisting gaps in awareness about the mechanisms themselves. What is required is a demand-side assessment through baseline surveys that map and carve out territories that need focused campaigns.
An online citizen survey conducted by I4C with as few as 3,849 respondents and no disaggregation along urban, rural, caste, income, or community markers found that 83.42 percent had heard of the portal and 76.1 percent were aware of the helpline. But without appropriate representation and disaggregated data, these figures are not helpful.
NCRB data shows that of the 1 lakh cybercrime cases in 2024, only around 35,000 were registered in metropolitan cities.
There is also an inherent assumption that awareness is lowest among rural and ‘digitally less literate populations’. This is evident from I4C using regional language caller tunes, SMS alerts, cinema and radio campaigns, grassroots engagement through NCC/NSS/NYKS students, school webinars, and events like Raahgiri and Kumbh Mela to reach ‘lower income groups and rural populations with limited access to digital education’. Even as NCRB data shows that of the 1 lakh cybercrime cases in 2024, only around 35,000 were registered in metropolitan cities, meaning that more than 65 percent were reported in smaller cities, towns, and villages. This could mean that either awareness or incidence is higher in the latter (or both), because higher absolute numbers could just as easily be attributed to greater population density as to greater awareness. The figures do not point us in the direction of the causal link.
The figures do not tell us anything about the population size or density, demographic profile, vulnerability or resilience of digital architecture among states and union territoriess. There is no granular sub-state data beyond metros, no Tier-II or -III city-level or district or village-level breakdown, and no published analysis mapping complaint rates against awareness campaign activity by geography and/or social group. Campaign targeting therefore cannot be evidence-based.
The way to close this gap is to move away from mass broadcast campaigns and towards region- specific campaigns tailored by channel, messenger, cultural fit, and institutional anchor.
- Evidence from SHG-based interventions in Uttar Pradesh endorses a community-embedded model with peer educators as mediators of knowledge transfer, especially among marginalised women.
- The report itself proposes that awareness programmes move to sustained, institutionalised community engagement through frontline workers such as ASHA and anganwadi workers, self-help groups, teachers, and youth volunteers.
- The National Commission of Women (NCW)’s Women Safety Audit Platform offers a template for generating the intelligence that cyber safety campaigns currently lack, using surveys and focused group discussions to generate city-level score cards.
- The e-SafeHER programme launched in April 2026 is attempting to replicate NCW’s model, albeit only in rural areas.
Uneven internet access and device ownership
Limited internet and mobile access hampers proportionate reporting of cybercrimes by women. Newly released data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6; 2023-24) reveals that the percentage of Indian women who have ever used the internet has nearly doubled to 64.3 percent from 33.3 percent in the previous round (NFHS-5; 2019-21). Data from the Comprehensive Modular Survey: Telecom (CMS-T) 2025 paints a different picture, with 92.3 percent of women in the 15–24 age group having used the internet at least once in the three months preceding the date of the survey. However, this is the youngest cohort among the women surveyed. When the age cap is removed and we move to older groups, this figure falls by 29.2 percentage points, to 63.1 percent.
The data also shows that a mere 56.2 percent of women reported owning a mobile phone, which is not necessarily a smart phone, while this figure for men is as high as 84 percent.
The report does not present estimates disaggregated by caste, class, ethnicity, or other markers of identity that dictate access and inclusion.
The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA)’s Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025 finds that only 36 percent of women in India own a smartphone and only 39 percent have adopted the use of mobile internet at all. This is not very far removed from the NFHS-5 findings. IAMAI’s Internet in India 2024 report claims that 59 percent of those accessing the internet on shared devices were women.
More importantly, the report does not present estimates disaggregated by caste, class, ethnicity, or any of the other markers of identity that dictate access and inclusion in a country as diverse as India. It only accounts for the rural-urban divide, which is significant, at a 13.2 percent margin.
We do have data disaggregated by social groups from the Comprehensive Annual Modular Survey (CAMS) 2022-23.
This data is not disaggregated by gender but the intersection between caste, gender, and digital access is well-documented in research literature and independent studies that shows that women from lower caste groups face a compounded exclusion from internet access and device ownership that places them at the furthest remove from the formal cybercrime reporting architecture as it currently exists, and that public data must reflect this granularity in order for proposed reforms to be truly inclusive and meaningful. A caste census would be the way to go, but the much-delayed Census survey could be a strong starting point.
Call for a better policy response
A shocking 78 percent of women in the 15–24 age bracket who had internet access reported that they did not have the ability to report cybercrime on the portal. Again, when the age cap is dispensed with, only 12.7 percent of women aged 15 and above could report cybercrime online.
The portal offers only Hindi and English as its primary interface languages. Even the 1930 helpline has no published multilingual support framework beyond these two languages. While the MHA boasts of I4C’s regional language campaigns to reach ‘digitally naive users’ and the government’s Information Security Education and Awareness project curates a repository of multilingual awareness resources covering 102 topics on cyber hygiene and cyber safety, a woman reached by these campaigns in, say, Odia or Bhojpuri, who then attempts to file a complaint, encounters a portal that cannot receive her in her own language.
Proposing assisted reporting mechanisms through frontline institutions such as anganwadi centres, one-stop centres, women helplines such as 181, Mahila Police volunteers, panchayat digital kiosks, and common service centres, the report recognises that remedies cannot be premised on universal digital access or literacy. It further recommends that the NCRP and 1930 helpline be made available in all Schedule-VIII languages, alongside simplified interfaces, audio guidance, and visual icons to support first-time users. However, this should function as an interim measure rather than a substitute for structural inclusion.
The report does not sufficiently interrogate why women are disproportionately targeted online in the first place. There is little recognition of the cultural architecture that produces deepfake abuse, revenge pornography, sextortion, or coordinated trolling. Digital spaces have become amplifiers for misogyny and sexual violence, further exacerbated by AI, and TF-GBV is embedded within social attitudes that routinely question women’s characters rather than perpetrators’ conduct. Every structural condition that suppresses women’s reporting—stigma, police distrust, and digital exclusion itself—simultaneously emboldens perpetrators. Impunity and under-reporting are therefore inseparable. A policy response focused only on enhancing reports, without confronting the social and institutional ecosystems that sustain abuse, will remain reactive and permanently fall short.
In the longer term, the government must directly address underlying disparities in digital access, device ownership, connectivity, language inclusion, and cyber awareness through evidence-based interventions grounded in credible, disaggregated data on who is excluded from existing cybercrime reporting systems and why.
—
Know more
- Read more about why we need to change how crime is reported against women.
- Read more about how online violence disproportionately affects women.
Click Here For The Original Source.
