ORDER :

1. This writ petition under Article 226 of the Constitution of India is filed seeking a mandamus declaring the action of the 3rd respondent-Station House Officer of Kankipadu Police Station, Vijayawada City, in registering the FIR in Crime No. 239/2021 for the offences punishable under Sections 120B, 403, 408, 420 and 477A of IPC and under Section 66C read with Section 43 of the Information Technology Act, 2008, against the petitioners on the basis of the report lodged by the de facto complainant, who is the 4th respondent, as unconstitutional and consequently to set aside the same.

2. Facts of the prosecution case, germane to dispose of this writ petition, as set out in the FIR, may be stated as follows:

(a) Varsity Education Management Private Limited (VEMPL, for brevity) is a company registered under the Companies Act, 1956. It has been doing business in providing education and coaching for competitive examinations to the students and also rendering educational services to various institutions under the name and style “Sri Chaitanya” through its various branches. The de facto complainant is one of the directors of the said VEMPL. It is stated that VEMPL over the past 10 years and Sri Chaitanya over the past 35 years developed intellectual property which includes academic curriculum, study material, teaching methods, teaching points, pupil's activity, teacher's activity, questioning hypothesis, evaluation, teacher's ability, programmes, question bank, academic knowledge, experience driven programmes by utilizing faculty and resources throughout the country by spending several crores of rupees and stored and saved the said intellectual property for exclusive use of the said educational institutions in the hard disks of the computer systems in an encrypted storage by installing the best antivirus software with a strong password to prevent hacking or gaining access to the outsiders.

(b) Except the Executive Dean, Dean or Data Analyst of the branches of VEMPL, the said data stored in the computer system is not accessible to any other person.

(c) The said VEMPL, in the brand name of Sri Chaitanya, has established Gosala branches at Gosala campus of Vijayawada in the year 2014 and has been imparting education and giving coaching etc. to the students. The management of VEMPL, Sri Chaitanya group appointed accused 1 to 3 i.e. Mr. V. Narendra Babu (accused No. 1) as an Executive Dean, Sri N. Srinivasa Rao (accused No. 2) as a Dean and Sri G. Balakrishna Prasad (accused No. 3) as a Data Analyst in the year 2014. They have entered into Employment Agreements with VEMPL which are being renewed from time to time and it is stated that they are still in force. Therefore, they have domain over the entire infrastructure including the computers, hardware and software and they got exclusive access to them. The accused 1 to 3 have agreed in their Employment Agreements that they shall not use the confidential information entrusted to them by the employer at any time directly or indirectly to have personal commercial advantage or to do anything which is detrimental to the business or activities of the employer in any manner and that the said concepts, ideas etc. written or electronically developed by the employee during the course of his employment, exclusively belong to the company and also gave an undertaking to keep confidentiality of the same. Therefore, reposing confidence in the accused 1 to 3, the company has entrusted the said confidential and valuable computer data and details of the students in good faith to the accused 1 to 3 by providing passwords of the computer systems to them for the purpose of using the said data exclusively for the purpose of running the educational institutions, establishments and schools belonging to the employer and for using the same to impart education to the students studying in Gosala branches of Sri Chaitanya group.

(d) It is stated that while so, accused 1 to 3 stopped attending duties from 16-5-2021 ab