Sibal's censorship bid may cost India e-ranking

India's position on Internet freedom is expected to "fall" due to the govt's proposed curbs on social media websites such as Facebook and Google, claimed Bridget Welsh, a professor of political science at the University of Singapore. Chetan Chauhan reports. Free falling

Updated on: Apr 27, 2012, 09:48:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Singapore

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India's position on Internet freedom is expected to "fall" due to the government's proposed curbs on social media websites such as Facebook and Google, claimed Bridget Welsh, a professor of political science at the University of Singapore.

Welsh had access to the yet-to-be-published Freedom on Internet Report-2012, where countries are ranked in accordance with their policies on the Web, such as obstacles to Internet access, limits on content, and violation of user rights.

The report is published every year by US-based think tank Freedom House. In the 2011 report, India was ranked 14 among 37 nations with a score of 36, meaning "partly-free" on Internet freedom. Countries are ranked from zero to 100 on the scorecard, with zero depicting the highest level of freedom and 100 depicting the lowest.

A year later, Welsh said, India's rank is likely to fall several notches down to "not-free" or poor level of Internet freedom. It is primarily on the basis of telecom minister Kapil Sibal's December 2011 bid to censor sites such as Facebook and Google.

Sibal had asked these websites to submit content for screening before placing it in the public domain, much to the outrage of netizens. He also wanted these sites to prescreen user content from India and remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it went online.

In her presentation at the workshop, organised by the Tamasek Foundation for journalists from Asia, Welsh described Sibal's action as a direct curb on freedom of expression on the Internet. "It is sad that in a democratic country, the government has imposed new restrictions on websites," Welsh told HT.

The Freedom on Internet Report is likely to be released in August 2012. India is among the 12 Asian countries, whose policies on the Internet were analysed. The Freedom House assigns each country a score based on those criteria. While countries scoring anywhere between 0-30 are designated "free", those scoring from 31-60 are designated "partly free", and those with a score between 61-100 are labelled "not free".

While countries such as Estonia, United States and Germany have been designated as free, countries such as China and Iran are branded as "not free".

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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