-The Hindu It has been exercised for the past 11 years, clarifies I&B Ministry The Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting on Saturday clarified that no “new provision” had been added to the existing law, after uproar over a provision of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, under which the Secretary of the Ministry can block public access to any information in case of emergency. “Certain misgivings...

-The Indian Express Apar Gupta writes: The substance of many of the requirements were never put to public consultation or deliberation by experts. This is particularly the case for the regulations for online news portals and video streaming platforms. In the polarised environment that we now inhabit, there are few public agreements. One of these rare instances is an agreement that social media is broken. For many commentators, this is an area...

-The Indian Express These rules come even as a Joint Parliamentary Committee is in the final stages of discussion of a privacy Bill that covers aspects such as the role of social media intermediaries and the reach of Big Tech companies, and the privacy accorded to the users on such platforms. The notification of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, the Government’s first move to regulate...

-The Hindu Researchers noted that the changes in the Indian Ocean temperature have a huge effect on the rainfall in the region The quiet, sleepy, yet mesmerising village of Mawsynram trounced Cherrapunji to become the wettest place in the world. Mawsynram receives over 10,000 millimetres of rain in a year. Decreasing trend A recent study that looked at the rainfall pattern in the past 119 years found a decreasing trend at Cherrapunji and nearby...

-The Hindu The legal regime that enables the government to block websites needs urgent reform On February 1, 2021, in the wake of the intensification of the farmers’ protests and reports of violent incidents on January 26 – a number of Twitter accounts became inaccessible in India. These included (among many others) the accounts of The Caravan magazine, the actor Sushant Singh, and the Kisan Ekta Morcha handle, which was chronicling the...