India has emerged as one of the biggest contributors and consumers of child pornography despite a crackdown against such material on the Internet.

Cyber experts told Mail Today that a new smut video is created in India every 40 minutes and Kerala tops the list in uploading such content while Haryana leads in viewing it, on mobile.

Alarmingly, 35-38 per cent of the total porn uploaded on the web is related to children or teenagers. Keywords like "schoolgirls", "teens" and "desi girls" are among the top searched as they lead to child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Analysis by cyber security experts showed that 35-40 per cent of content downloaded daily from India is pornography, which would be in several thousand terabytes.

"The content and consumers of child pornography are growing at a sharp rate. There are no exact statistics but our findings show that search engines get over 1,16,000 queries every day related to child pornography. The volume of such content can be estimated as every second around 380 people are looking for 'adult' content on search engines. Around 25 per cent of all search engine queries are related to pornography which will be about 68 million search queries a day," said Kislay Chaudhary, director of the Indian Cyber Army (ICA).

C.S.A.M. CONTENT: TIER 2, 3, 4 CITIES MAJOR CONTRIBUTORS

Recent trends show that maximum CSAM content is being shot on mobile devices and tier 2, 3 and 4 cities have emerged as major contributors. Children in rural areas and from underprivileged backgrounds are soft targets but a large number of school students in urban areas are also vulnerable.

Pawan Duggal, noted lawyer and IT expert, told Mail Today that despite stringent directives by the Supreme Court, content related to CSAM is growing. "There is a massive demand for Indian content in the global market as it is much cheaper for them to buy. Websites are flooded with child pornography," he said.

Duggal explained that there are stringent punishments under the IT Act against viewing and sharing of such material but enforcement is lax. He pointed out that the government is aiming to block the websites but is not checking the source of the content.

The focus on the matter grew after Delhi police found objectionable photos of 15-20 children in a phone and laptop of an arrested British national who allegedly sexually assaulted three visually impaired minor inmates of the National Association for the Blind (NAB) in south Delhi's RK Puram.

The ICA research shows Kerala is a major contributor of CSAM content while states like Haryana, Assam, Bihar, Punjab, Delhi and West Bengal are high in viewing it.

URBAN CHILDREN USING DATING, MESSENGER APPS VULNERABLE

Cyber investigator Rakshit Tandon explained that urban children are falling prey to dating and messenger apps from where their personal pictures are getting leaked and are being uploaded on porn websites.

"Young children are glued to the latest dating and messenger apps but they do not know about the side-effects," he said.

There is no fresh government study on the spread or volume of explicit content but official data shows that there was a 100 per cent increase in cases of publication or transmission of obscene material, including child pornography, using electronic means in just one year - 2012 to 2013.

Acting strict against Internet majors like Google, Yahoo and Facebook as well as instant messaging application WhatsApp, the Supreme Court on Monday directed them to furnish details of complaints they have received in India about the uploading of objectionable content on child pornography, rape and gang rape.

Duggal explained that the country has no central database of such crimes and offenders. According to experts, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) statistics do not provide any information on child pornography cases.

CENTRE BLOCKS 3,522 WEBSITES

However, the Centre recently told the Supreme Court that it has adopted several steps to curb online child sexual abuse content, including blocking 3,522 websites carrying child pornographic materials in June this year.

The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has ordered the Internet Service Providers Association of India and the department of telecommunication to disable or remove access to child pornography sites by adopting the IWF list to prevent the distribution and transmission of online CSAM in India.

Earlier, cyber security officials, who function under the CBI, had told the bench that the Internet was a "wild highway" and blocking objectionable content at the source was a technical challenge for which clear guidelines are needed to stop circulation of such material.

A blocked website is up and running again in a matter of days because the business is so lucrative. "Trading of CSAM on the darknet is a bigger worry as it has become a huge market for trading such content. Global buyers are directly buying content from India which gets uploaded to thousands of porn websites," said Amit Dubey, cyber crime expert and ethical hacker.

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