PUNE: The Cyber Cell of Pune police has embarked upon forming special groups focusing on college and high school students to create mass awareness on prevention of cyber crimes.

As part of this initiative, the cyber cell on Thursday launched groups from 11 leading city colleges with a plan to cover rest of the educational institutions by end of November.

Students and faculties of these colleges were presented with a set of posters at a special function held at city Police Commissionerate on Thursday. Each set with 24 posters highlights dos and don’ts to be followed in different fields of cyber world such as e-banking, social networking, usage of debit/credit cards and emails.

COEP, MIT, Modern Engineering College, ILS Law College, I2IT, Pune Vidyarthi Gruha are some of the institutes that are covered under the initial phase of project.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Economic Offence Wing and Cyber Crime) Rajendra Dahale said various awareness programmes would be conducted round the year by means of these groups of students.

He said that most of the college and high schools in the city will be roped in with formation of special units comprising three to four educational institutions for better coordination.

Meanwhile, the third anniversary of cyber training lab of Pune police was also celebrated at the function.

The lab, which is being run on the public-private partnership basis, has trained 111 batches so far.

SIX-FOLD RISE

Cyber crimes in the city have reported over six-fold rise over past three years. “In 2006, there were only 43 complaints of cyber crimes with this number swelling to 272 in 2009,” DCP Rajendra Dahale of Cyber Cell said. He said awareness among the people is the best way to prevent cyber crime