Gujarat Police just launched one of the most ambitious cyber-safety drives seen from a state force — with numeric targets, a 24-hour complaint guarantee, and a reach into 10,000 schools. Here’s what it actually commits to.
Based on Gujarat Police and Chief Minister’s Office statements · July 2026
On July 1, Gujarat Police began Operation Surakshit Cyberspace, a 28-day statewide campaign focused on the online safety of women and children. It runs until July 28 and combines three things that don’t usually appear together in a single police initiative: mass public awareness, victim-support infrastructure, and a hard operational deadline for how fast complaints get handled.
“Safety through awareness, investigation through technology, action through law, and a safer Gujarat through public participation.”
— Campaign slogan, Gujarat Police
What Problem Is This Actually Targeting?
Additional Director General of Police (CID Crime – Women Cell) Ajay Choudhary framed the campaign around a specific set of threats: cyberstalking, online harassment, financial scams, and identity theft — all forms of cybercrime that disproportionately affect women and children, and that often go unreported because victims don’t know where to turn or fear the response won’t be timely.
That last point seems to be the campaign’s real design center. Rather than treating awareness and enforcement as separate tracks, the initiative tries to close the gap between “a citizen reports a problem” and “police actually act on it” — and puts a number on that gap.
The Numbers Behind the Campaign
What sets this apart from a typical awareness drive is that it comes with explicit, measurable targets — the kind of framework more common in a corporate rollout than a policing initiative:
| Target | Scale |
|---|---|
| Citizens to be educated on cyber safety | 25 lakh (2.5 million) |
| Students taking the Cyber Safety Pledge | 20 lakh (2 million) |
| Schools running awareness programmes | 10,000 |
| Colleges running cyber safety workshops | 1,500 |
| Adolescent girls reached directly | 1 lakh (100,000) |
| Parental awareness sessions | 5,000 |
| Response time on women/child cyber complaints | Within 24 hours |
The 24-hour response commitment is arguably the most consequential line item here. Awareness campaigns are common; a public, time-bound service guarantee on complaint handling is a much stronger accountability mechanism — one that’s easy to measure and, in principle, easy for the public to hold police to.
Who’s Actually Running It
Implementation is being pushed down to the local level through existing SHE Teams and dedicated Cyber Crime Police Stations, which will run the on-the-ground awareness sessions and community outreach. But the campaign also formally brings in partners outside the police force:
BanksTelecom providersSchools & collegesResident Welfare AssociationsNGOsCommunity leaders
Involving banks and telecom companies directly is notable — a large share of the financial-fraud and identity-crime cases the campaign targets ultimately depend on speed of account freezes and number-blocking, both of which require exactly this kind of institutional coordination rather than policing alone.
The Built-In Accountability Layer
According to the campaign design, field officers have clearly defined responsibilities, monitoring mechanisms, and performance indicators — meaning this isn’t just a set of aspirational public targets, but something with an internal tracking structure behind it. Police units have reportedly been directed to proactively verify cyber alerts and identify at-risk individuals, rather than waiting solely for complaints to arrive.
Worth watching: Ambitious public targets are only meaningful if they’re reported on afterward. Whether Gujarat Police publish actual outcomes against these numbers — how many of the 25 lakh citizens were reached, how many complaints hit the 24-hour mark — will determine if this becomes a genuine accountability benchmark or just a launch-day headline.
Why the Timing and Scope Make Sense
This campaign lands against a backdrop of rising digital-fraud and cyber-harassment cases across India generally, with women and children consistently identified as higher-risk groups for cyberstalking, online exploitation, and scams. A campaign that combines prevention (awareness in schools and among parents), protection (faster complaint response), and infrastructure (coordination with banks and telecoms) is a broader approach than most single-agency cyber-safety pushes, which tend to focus on just one of those three levers.
Bottom Line
Operation Surakshit Cyberspace is unusually specific for a public-safety campaign — it names its targets in raw numbers, sets an explicit 24-hour service standard, and formally enlists private-sector partners rather than relying on police alone. That specificity is also what will make it easy to judge: by July 28, Gujarat Police will either have hit these numbers or they won’t, and that gap will say more about the campaign’s real impact than the launch announcement does.