‘The Maharashtra govt needs to have an exclusive CBI Act’

Chief of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Ashwani Kumar speaks to DNA about the CBI and the cases that matter

What are the innovative measures taken by the CBI to investigate tough cases?
CBI has introduced the concept of multi-disciplinary investigation teams to solve complicated cases, where apart from police officers, law officers, bank officers, chartered accountants, cost and works accountants and forensic experts are associated in investigation work. Modern scientific tools, such as DNA fingerprinting techniques, voice recognition and face recognition, algorithms for fast search of databases, new encryption techniques have given a tremendous edge to our fight against crime.

What are new generation economic offences?
One is technology-centric and the other is technology-facilitated. The technology-centric crimes are hacking, denial of service attacks, phishing, botnets, virus attacks and Trojan Horse. The second group of economic crimes is facilitated by advancement in technology. Some traditional crimes are now possible in simpler ways. These are internet pornography, Nigerian letter frauds, ATM/credit card frauds. These can de-stabilise the financial sector and can cause banking losses

What does CBI require from the government at this stage?
One area where we need to have a better legal mandate from the government is an exclusive CBI Act.

Presently we have Delhi Special Police Establishment Act of 1946, but we are in the 21st Century and need to have a new Act.

We have already worked on a draft of CBI Act 2010