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Cops raid offices, confiscate monitors but leave the hard-disks and CPUs behind

You may find this title funny but its a true story and has happened in the past in India. In another incidence, Mumbai cops seized pirated software floppies and stapled them together as though they were documents, destroying the material.

The Indian IT community has burnt a lot of midnight oil to gain a prominent position in the technology arena. Everyday, we come across news on jobs moving to India due to availability of skilled, english speaking and not so expensive tech professionals. Offshoring was even an issue in the Bush-Kerry election campaign. Most of the international giants like Microsoft, IBM, Sun have their research and tech-support centers in India.

India is in the news again because of technology but due to different reasons. Recently, Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of Baazee.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay, was arrested because somebody was selling a porn video clip on Baazee and Avnish, a US citizen, wanted to help the Indian police in the investigation by giving access to the Baazee webservers. Some say, the Indian cops just over-reacted. Why did they not arrest the CEO of the mobile company on which the MMS was circulated ? There were even talks on shutting down Baazee ?

Indian police does have a Cyber Crime Investigation Cell to deal with such crimes but their are numerous instances on Wired which certainly prove that Indian Cops are still miles away from technology unlike the young Indian tech professionals.

Last month, a Mumbai tabloid wanted to demonstrate that the average Indian cop lived in a world far removed from everyday technology. It asked a constable to use his ATM card and photographed his every step. He did not know how to use the card and the machine swallowed it. He was left smiling sheepishly in the final frame.

"The cop who checks your car license does not own a car," said Raghu Raman, who heads an information security firm called Mahindra Special Services Group. "The passport official who checks your passport does not go abroad. The cop to whom you go to register a credit card misuse does not own a credit card. If a cop is in no position to own a computer, how can he fight cybercrime? The field cop (and) the beat constable live in another world."

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