I just now read the news
about Mr. Kapil Sibal (read this carefully..."Minister of Human Resource
Development and Communication & Information Technology of India")
meeting the officials of biggest players of the Internet like Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft, Facebook etc. to censor the content put up by the users and that too
by the most stupid method of "manually" doing it. Read the TechCrunch's
take on this here...
Check out the news on
Hindustan Times here...
We keep talking about the
Indian economy in the global perspective and position of India
internationally... I wonder what kind of image are we projecting by such
"innovative" initiatives by none other than the Communication &
Information Technology Minister of India..?
Indian Democracy being the
largest democracy in the world and this is the way people are going to use
their Right to Speech, Expression..? This is really sad. If at all there is a
serious problem that the comments can offend the secularism of our nation then
I guess first we need to ponder as to how many Internet users are there in
India..? Don't we have other issues to look upon other than this ..?
Moreover, if they really
think that people's opinions on Internet can create a considerable havoc to the
national integrity then probably it is the time for them to figure out the ways
to use Internet for better administration. We also know that there can be
numerous ways of using Internet for the betterment of the democracy; instead of
thinking about the feasibility of these options, we are actually concerned
about what people post on "their personal" facebook account about the
politicians ??
On one hand they are
distributing the Ubislate tablets bundled with Internet plans for more and more
people to be Internet literate and on the other hand they are trying to tie our
hands so that we can not even voice our opinions about different things. Well
they should realise that truth indeed is always bitter; its even more
bitter when you know the level of corruption you are sunk in.
Internet can be used for
better surveillance (referring to corruption), better transparency in
governance (referring to funds and taxes received), probably better
voting methodologies, better feedback on governance and what not..? I am just a
student so I don't really know much in this regard but I hope (or may be hoped)
that the "Minister of Human Resource Development and Communication &
Information Technology of India" knows better.
