Put nodal agency in place, Supreme Court to govt

New Delhi: With a view to ensuring that explicit videos depicting rape, gang rape (RGR) and child pornography (CP) are not available for circulation in the Internet, the Supreme Court has asked the Government of India to put in place the portal of the nodal agency which can ask search engines like Google, yahoo, Facebook and WhatsApp to block such videos.

A bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta gave this direction taking note of the status report filed by the Centre after it had a meeting with the representatives of the search engines. The bench passed this order in the petition relating to Prajwala, NGO seeking court’s intervention to block such contents in Internet. The apex court had in February 2015 had taken suo motu cognisance of a letter written to the then Chief Justice of India by the NGO Prajwala, along with a pen drive containing two videos highlighting the crime committed by the gang and seeking appropriate action against the culprits, who had the temerity to upload the offensive videos on the Internet.  The letter was converted into a PIL.