The digital news portals registration landscape is about to mark a change in India. According to reports, the Indian government is in the process of presenting a Bill to the Cabinet that will implement a new registration system for the newspaper and digital news media industries.
This is the government’s second attempt to regulate online news sources equally with print ones.
The proposed legislation, known as the Registration of Press and Periodicals Bill, aims to replace the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867, a piece of British-era legislation that currently ignores the regulation of printing presses and newspapers published in the nation.
Government to review bill for digital news portals registration
According to a report, the Centre has completed all inter-ministerial and other stakeholder consultations, and the Bill will now go to the Cabinet for its nod. Thereafter, the government plans to table it in the Parliament at the ‘earliest’.
The Bill will reportedly bring digital news portals under the ambit of the proposed legislation and mandate them to register with the Press Registrar General, at par with newspapers. The Press Registrar General will serve as the equivalent of the prevalent Registrar of Newspapers in India (RNI).
In addition, the Bill also seeks to remove provisions in the existing law relating to registration of books and connected matters. The report noted that the Bill proposes to ‘decriminalise’ and simplify registration requirements and regulations.
The Centre had made the first move on the matter in 2017. The 2017 version of the Bill was called ‘Registration of Newspapers and Publications Bill, 2017’ and was then republished two years later as the ‘Registration of Press and Periodicals Bill, 2019’ with certain changes.
The Bill was the brainchild of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, led by Prakash Javadekar then, and sought to introduce regulations mandating online news portals to register with the government.
The 2019 draft defined ‘news on digital media’ as ‘news in digitised format that can be transmitted over the internet, computer or mobile networks and includes text, audio, video and graphics’.
