Expressing concern over rising cyber pornography in the country, the Rajya Sabha was petitioned on Friday to direct the Government to amend the Information Technology Act to make keeping pornographic material on computer and mobile phones a crime besides provisioning severe punishment to the producer, distributor and viewers of online pornography.
The Government was also urged to establish a Cyber Police Force under the National Investigation Agency to implement the IT Act and curb cyber pornography, crime and terrorism. TRAI should issue guidelines for telecom companies to curb watching pornography on mobile gadgets, said Congress MP Vijay J Darda in the petition jointly submitted along with Jain Acharya Vijay Ransundersuri.
Highlighting that cyber pornography is addicting millions of children affecting their tender minds, it said that many become sexually active at tender age leading to psycho-physical problems like Sexually Transmitted Diseases and teenage pregnancies. It also leads to rise in incidents of rape and other crimes. With 200 million children in the country, child pornography exploits many of them exposing them to human trafficking and child prostitution through net.
Pointing out that pornographic web pages have grown hundredfold and more than 70 per cent of traffic on Internet is adult in nature, it demanded that India should follow Australian model of providing free Internet filters to all the PC owners and cyber cafes to check these porn sites. There should be policy enforcing compulsion for every Internet Service Provider to block porn sites.
Terming cyber pornography as a poison for children and youth which destroys marriages and families, the petition said that it is totally unacceptable and dangerous for the society.
Since millions of porn sites are freely available on the net selling porn films through net using credit cards and other facilities of banking system, it demanded that banking vigilance system should be used to identify the distributors and viewers of cyber pornography.