They came from nine districts. They had been surveyed, scrutinised, verified and interviewed. Of the more than 82,000 enrolled digital volunteers across Bareilly Zone, only 112 had made the cut. On Christmas Eve, they gathered at the Bareilly Police Lines for a day-long meeting that was less a routine briefing and more a landmark moment in the ten-year story of one of India's most ambitious community policing experiments.
The meeting was chaired by Additional Director General of Police (ADG) Bareilly Zone Ramit Sharma — the man who had conceived the Digital Volunteers initiative as a young DIG in Meerut Range in 2015, set up Uttar Pradesh Police's first Social Media Lab, watched the programme spread across all 75 districts of the state, and then — in its tenth year — had the institutional honesty to ask whether the network was still as sharp as it needed to be.
The answer had come through nine months of rigorous work — a 36-form digital survey in March, manual verification by the zonal social media team, telephonic interviews and careful selection. The 112 people in the room on December 24 were not just attendees. They were the programme's answer to its own question.
The ADG's assessment
Speaking exclusively to NDD, ADG Sharma reflected on what the day had meant.
"This meeting was held after a rigorous exercise following the survey held in March. All the digital volunteers in today's meeting were interviewed by the zonal social media team and a representative sample of very active and long-term associates of the digital volunteers were chosen. Today's meeting was very useful and the experiences, suggestions and feedback given by the digital volunteers will be used to optimise the digital volunteer programme," he said.
The meeting was attended by DIG Bareilly Range, SSP Bareilly and SP Rampur — a line-up that signalled to every volunteer in the room that this was not a peripheral exercise. It was institutional priority.
The new battlefield
Addressing the gathering, Sharma laid out the landscape that today's digital volunteer must navigate — one vastly more complex than the child-lifting rumours that had swept through Moradabad Range in 2019, the kind of crisis the early network was built to counter.
Today's threats are different in kind, not just degree. "Digital arrest" scams — where fraudsters impersonate law enforcement officials and extort money from terrified citizens — have become one of the most damaging forms of cyber fraud. Deepfakes, powered by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, can put words in anyone's mouth and faces on anyone's body. Misinformation travels faster than any fact-check.
To make sense of this landscape, Sharma introduced volunteers to the framework of Information Disorder — three distinct categories that every digital volunteer must understand:
Mal-information is truth weaponised to cause harm — real information deployed with deliberate malicious intent.
Dis-information is deliberate falsehood — fabricated content created and spread with the intent to deceive.
Mis-information is false content spread without harmful intent — the well-meaning share of something that happens to be untrue.
Understanding the difference, Sharma explained, is the first step toward countering each effectively. Volunteers were urged to report suspicious content immediately on the UP Police fact-check handle @UPPViralCheck on X, and to direct victims of cyber fraud to the national helpline 1930.
Meet Jarvis
One of the meeting's most talked-about moments came when Sharma explained about Jarvis to volunteers— UP Police's first AI Public Relations Officer, launched in January 2025 and already operational for nearly a year.
Jarvis is no ordinary AI influencer. Created personally by Sharma — an IIT Kanpur electrical engineering graduate who has long believed that technology and policing are natural allies — Jarvis holds the rank of Sub-Inspector and speaks in the first person. Jarvis delivers audio and video awareness messages directly to citizens on traffic rules, women's safety and cyber fraud prevention.
In its very first post, Jarvis had introduced the concept of Information Disorder to social media audiences — the same framework Sharma was now teaching in person to the volunteers gathered before him. The programme's human network and its AI officer were, in effect, being trained on the same curriculum.
For the digital volunteers in the room — themselves social media influencers ranging from nano to macro in their reach — Jarvis represented both a tool and a benchmark. If an AI officer could maintain a consistent, credible and active social media presence, so could they.
Beyond misinformation: The fuller agenda
The day's discussions ranged across several other fronts. Mission Shakti Phase-5.0 and the work of Mission Shakti Kendras — UP's flagship programme for women's safety — were reviewed, with volunteers encouraged to amplify its reach through their own platforms.
The newly launched Parvah campaign — a digital road-safety initiative being run across all nine districts of Bareilly Zone through social media — was also discussed. Volunteers were asked to become its amplifiers, carrying its message into communities that official handles alone cannot reach.
The voices from the floor
The most revealing moments of the day came not from the dais but from the volunteers themselves.
Lavleen Kapoor from Kotwali Bareilly — instantly recognisable in his signature Himachali cap and a volunteer since the very first days of the programme — had a message that cut to the heart of the network's future. "This is the best programme so far," he told NDD. "Since 2015 when we first came here for the initiative, I have seen it grow. A person who is not active on social media platforms cannot spread awareness about digital crimes or cyber issues. We must keep only quality and influential volunteers in the network."
Abdul Rashid Ansari from Sungadhi police station in Pilibhit district, speaking in his blue jacket, independently arrived at the same conclusion. "Since its inauguration, the programme was of a very different type. Now in this digital and very fast era, the training given by police is excellent. We need limited people, but good people — only active volunteers can make a real difference."
That two veterans, from different districts and different backgrounds, made the same observation without prompting is significant. The March survey had already put their philosophy into practice. Their words were not a critique — they were a validation.
Dhakan Lal Gangwar from Bareilly captured the day's warmth simply and directly. "ADG Sahab, DIG Sahab and Kaptan Sahab — our SSP — have guided us so well. The entire police team has given us immense respect. We are fully committed to this mission of digital awareness and social harmony."
In that single sentence — ADG Sahab, DIG Sahab, Kaptan Sahab — lay a decade of relationship-building between a police force and its citizen volunteers. Not hierarchy. Partnership.
A decade measured in distance travelled
Volunteers who have been part of the programme since its early years described the shift in its focus as the meeting's most striking theme. In 2019, the Digital Volunteers network had been mobilised to counter child-lifting rumours spreading through Moradabad Range — dangerous, community-fracturing falsehoods that required swift, local debunking. That was the programme's original battlefield.
The December 24 meeting spoke a different language entirely — deepfakes, AI misuse, digital arrest fraud, Information Disorder taxonomy, an AI officer named Jarvis. The network had not merely grown. It had evolved — keeping pace with the very threats it was created to counter.
The meeting ended with all 112 volunteers taking a collective pledge to uphold social harmony and serve as a trusted bridge between the police and the public in the digital domain. The pledge was not ceremonial. For people who had survived a nine-month selection process to earn their place in the room, it carried the weight of demonstrated commitment.
Officials described the gathering as a defining milestone in the #DV10years campaign — the formal celebration of a decade since a single Social Media Lab in Meerut had quietly asked whether ordinary citizens could be partners in policing the digital space.
On December 24, 2025, 112 of those citizens answered: we still are.
