“Ethical and responsible AI for public good is our core motto,” said Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. “AI has the power to transform by improving efficiency, enhancing quality of life and delivering true ease of living for every citizen.”
The state even created a special purpose vehicle to introduce AI solutions in law enforcement. It is known by the acronym MARVEL, which stands for Maharashtra Advanced Research and Vigilance for Enforcement of Reformed Laws.” The vision behind creating MARVEL is to build a platform that partners with global deep-technology leaders to develop AI copilots that can fundamentally transform the way we govern,” said Fadnavis.
Amid a surge in recent years of investing scams, refund frauds and digital arrests, Nitu’s case is just one of the millions of cybercrime complaints lodged in India. According to I4C data cited in a parliamentary reply on Dec. 2, 2025, nearly 2.27 million cybercrime cases were reported in 2024 alone. More than 228 billion rupees (US $2.5 billion) were lost to cyber criminals that year. I4C is the national agency set up by the Ministry of Home Affairs to create a framework for preventing, detecting, investigating and prosecuting cybercrime in India.
With most investigators not well-versed in tech, having an AI-powered digital assistant on hand has eased their workload.
In Nitu’s case, lodging her criminal complaint – known as a first information report or FIR – took just 15 minutes at the Saoner police station in Nagpur.
She supplied the scam site’s social media account and URL, mobile numbers, screenshots of her text messages and bank statements. All this information, be it on a PDF file or a handwritten note in English, Hindi or local language Marathi, can be uploaded, extracted and filed in their respective sections by MahaCrimeOS AI in minutes, freeing an investigator from tedious manual work to create a case file.
Assistant Police Inspector Ashish Singh Thakur, who handled Nitu’s case, said that before it would have taken two to three months to gather information for the investigation.
MahaCrimeOS AI incorporates investigation protocols of Maharashtra police. Photo by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft.
“We have to go to multiple banks because the funds were transferred across more than 40 to 50 different banks … We have to write them a letter and take a statement from them. Then, there were multiple mobile numbers used … I have to get the IP addresses. Lots of manual work,” he explained.
Instead, it took Thakur about a week to complete these tasks and hear back from these service providers.
“With a few clicks I can request the call detail records of multiple numbers. I don’t have to draft the letters; they’ve been drafted by MahaCrimeOS AI. And I don’t have to worry about missing out information or making mistakes in my letters, and having to start all over again,” he said.
He can now handle seven to eight cases a month, compared with just one previously.
Tools to aid law enforcement
Automating these frontline processes was just one part of the challenge, said Ram Ganesh, founder and CEO of CyberEye, the independent software vendor (ISV) that built the engine powering MahaCrimeOS AI. The company worked with MARVEL to customize it for Maharashtra police.
CyberEye is a Microsoft Partner ISV and works closely with the Microsoft India Development Center.
“Our first challenge was there was very minimal standardization,” he said.
This ranged from using varying terms in reports to describe the same financial fraud or criminal method, to not having standard legal notices seeking information from banks.
This made it harder for the police to decide on next steps, discover if cases were linked or build up legacy knowledge.
CyberEye worked with MARVEL to incorporate the Maharashtra police’s investigation protocols and make the platform available in Marathi, for ease of use by investigators.
They then added AI, in the form of an investigation copilot that analyses the case information, generates an automated workflow and suggests investigation pathways. The copilot was built using Azure OpenAI Service in Microsoft Foundry and secured with Defender for Cloud.
The platform also has built-in access to India’s criminal laws and open-source intelligence, which can be used to link crimes and locate suspects.
A key advantage of the platform is its ability to adapt existing best-practice protocols, add a level of knowledge specific to a crime and then develop tailored investigation plans, said Harssh A Poddar, superintendent of police, Nagpur Rural, and CEO of MARVEL.
“Now you have a copilot that is able to do that work taking on board knowledge resources that exist within the Maharashtra police,” he said.
Nagpur Rural police attend a training session on using MahaCrimeOS AI. Photo by Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Microsoft.
The system also frees officers to focus more on crime-solving and victim assistance, by replicating and automating administrative tasks they do in a typical day.
When an investigator logs on to MahaCrimeOS AI, they can view all the cases they are working on, whether there is new information on it or action to be taken.
In a financial fraud case, such actions include asking a bank to freeze an account, requesting a phone number be blocked or that a social media account be taken down.
Meanwhile, if call detail records have arrived from a telecommunications company, they can ask Investigation copilot how to proceed. Or they can click on its suggestion to analyze the records or gather open-source intelligence on a phone number.
These features enable officers to develop a very individualized investigation plan for every single cybercrime, said Poddar.
How MahaCrimeOS AI works
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