Transparency around the creation of the IT Rules

Hey all,

One core area of IFF’s work is ensuring transparency in government projects and regulations that impact your digital rights. This project is housed under our digital transparency vertical. Recently we commenced this work as soon as the anti-democratic and unconstitutional IT Rules, 2021 were announced.

Our work till now has been able to procure the complaints sent to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting around the OTT series, “Tandav” that was a precursor to how these Rules were extended to streaming platforms. Yesterday we also published details of a RTI response from the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEITY). MEITY seeking legal opinion and vetting of the Rules with the Law Ministry and took advice from M/s Vidhi Legal for their formulation. In the context of our own RTI, after the present spike in Covid and the wave of infections ceases we will examine every option on how to inspect the files on the IT Rules, 2021 and seek further transparency.

Subsequent, an IFF community member reached out to us and offered further details that were provided by the MEITY how as per it’s understanding the IT Rules, 2021 are a joint effort between it and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Further, M/s Vidhi Legal was contracted as a legal firm for legal advisory services for which a work order was placed at a total cost of 8,76,540/-. We are pasting it below and will keep updating this thread when more information is made available.

Please reach us at [email protected] if you have any further information to share on the IT Rules, 2021.

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