Not dead and buried: MIB's Ashwini Vaishnaw is 'open minded' on the Broadcasting Bill

A week after Ministry of Information and Broadcasting rolled back the revised draft of the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Ashwini Vaishnaw, said that the government is moving forward with an ‘open mind’ approach and would have extensive consultation on it before releasing a new draft.

Vaishnaw said, “We are very flexible and open-minded on this. We want this creator economy to flourish and the new medium to come up in a proper way. We are encouraging them. We want to make sure that whatever we do, we do after taking all the diverse views into consultation. We will have a series of extensive consultations,” said the minister.

Vaishnaw added that in recent times, a new content-creator economy has emerged across the country and the government was encouraging the segment.

“Our intent is to encourage it; that is giving more opportunities to express, share and create new intellectual property,” the minister said.

Vaishnaw said that the Bill was being conceived for encouraging content creators, and that it should not be construed otherwise. “Our intent is that this is giving more opportunities to express, share, and create new intellectual property,” Mr. Vaishnaw said. “That’s the way we look at it. So if that’s the thought process, we have to look at a much, much wider consultation process.”

The ministry last week announced that it is working on the draft and a fresh version would be published after detailed consultations. It also stated that additional time is being provided to submit feedback on the same till October 15.

The draft of the proposed Bill was first placed in the public domain to seek feedback in November 2023. It had a self-regulation mechanism to keep a check on obscene and vulgar content, hefty penalties in case of violations and self-classification of programmes. However, a fresh version of the document was shared selectively with stakeholders a few weeks ago.

The revised draft is reported to have proposed comprehensive regulations on independent news creators or influencers on social media platforms such as X, YouTube and Instagram, expanding its remit from Over-The-Top (OTT) content and digital news content.