Telangana cyber police plans to set up cyber labs in all districts of the state to tackle cyber crime in Telangana, said a top official Friday. The Crime Investigation Department (CID) is also training police officials in the districts in dealing with the cyber crime. T. Krishna Prasad, additional director general, CID, said they so far trained 246 officers.

For cyber crime cases booked in other districts, the police officials come to Hyderabad to take help of the cyber lab set up in 2010 under an initiative by Nasscom and Data Security Council of India. “We want to have such labs in all districts so that they deal with the cyber crime without coming to Hyderabad,” the police official said at a conference on cyber security organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here.

He urged the IT industry to share with the police the latest tools for tackling cyber crime free of cost. He called for collaboration between industry, investigating agencies and the policy makers for an effective strategy to tackle the increasing cyber crimes. Undivided Andhra Pradesh in 2013 registered 635 cases under the IT Act, the second highest in the country after Maharashtra. As many as 296 people were arrested in the state.

Prasad called for punitive action against the violators saying Cyber Security Policy 2013 has not addressed this aspect. He suggested to Telangana government to take up with the central government the need for punitive action. He noted that all the four convictions under the IT Act since 2010 took place in the undivided Andhra Pradesh.

Telangana IT minister K.T. Rama Rao said the government would work closely with the industry to device a policy that suit the needs of the newly-created state. He called for collaborative approach in view of the increasing cyber attacks. He underlined the need to have more cyber security professionals. The minister pointed out that India has only 22,000 such professionals against the requirement of 77,000. He said China has 25 million cyber warriors tackling the cyber threats.

R. Srinivas Rao, Head, Hyderabad centre of Wipro and convenor of CII panel on information technology, said a small and medium enterprises were coming under increasing cyber attacks. He said digital underground economy was thriving illegally by obtaining financial data.