The NDA Government has come down hard on Indian porn websites promoting child pornography and selling rape and gang-rape videos of Indian women and children.
Five such websites have been shut down by the central government on receiving tip-offs from the cyber portal of National Crime Records Bureau. Five separate FIRs have been lodged against these websites under various sections of the Information Technology Act.
The case is being probed by a special cell of Delhi police. The police said that they have lodged FIR under sections 67/67A and 67B of the Information Technology Act. Though the police have lodged cases no arrest was made since the people involved in this business have not been identified as they have been using a fake identity to get the URL and licence to run the websites. However, it was clear that these websites are being run from India.
The complainant, which in this case is the government, said in its FIR that the websites are promoting objectionable videos that are harmful to the society. The FIR lodged by the government read, “The websites are promoting rape and gang rape videos and should be urgently shut down. Please do something fast or else they will gain prominence.”
“These websites were also getting high traffic which was an alarming situation. We have informed police and have also written to Google and other companies who are providing and selling space to run websites,” confirmed sources.
The action is being seen as a big step to curb sexual harassment cases.
A few days back the Uttarakhand High Court, taking suo motu cognisance of a recent gang rape of a school student in Dehradun by her fellow students and ordered strict implementation of the ban on websites offering pornographic content. According to reports, the HC has asked the centre to cancel the licenses of websites that offer obscene content.
This decision came in the wake of a class-10 schoolgirl being gang-raped in a school in Dehradun by her seniors after they allegedly watched pornographic videos. The case had generated massive outrage after the school was accused of withholding information regarding the crime and violating several rules.
Taking cognisance of the case the Uttarakhand HC division bench comprising of acting chief justice Rajiv Sharma and justice Manoj Tiwari observed that unlimited access to pornographic websites should be blocked or curbed to avoid adverse influence over the impressionable minds of youngsters.
In 2015, the ministry of communications and IT, the department of telecommunications and the central government had listed over 800 websites and had issued an order to restrain service providers from transmitting them as their contents were found to be pornographic in nature.