New Delhi: India’s cabinet on Thursday approved the creation of a Doordarshan-like organization for social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
add_main_imageCalled the Bureau of New and Concurrent Media, this has been allotted a budget of ₹ 22.5 crore until 2017, and will be a part of the ministry of information and broadcasting.
The bureau, which will create content for and monitor social media (acting as an early warning system to issues that could blow up), will not regulate it.NextMAds
“The wing is an attempt to create an institutionalized presence in the virtual civilization,” said information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari. The body will have no regulatory power and will only be a platform to disseminate information, Tewari said.
How the new bureau will work wasn’t immediately clear. Many government departments, including the Prime Minister’s Office, for instance, have their own Twitter accounts.
“If other ministries want to put up information in the digital space, they can reach out to this platform. However, this is not a rigid totalitarian structure,” Tewari said.
A government official who spoke on condition of anonymity said ministries could choose to do their own thing on social media, or get the bureau to do it for them.
The new wing will be headed by a joint secretary level officer while the administrative manpower will be provided by the Research Reference and Training Division (RRTD).
“We have not asked for any additional human resources; we are re-engineering our resources from RRTD,” said Tewari.sixthMAds
The division will now be completely absorbed by the new bureau, which, according to Tewari, will have young officers from the Indian Information Service.
The information ministry proposed the creation of the bureau after running a pilot across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The exact contours of what this pilot did or achieved isn’t clear. “Essentially, the Internet was the most audacious attempt in anarchy and has succeeded. The Internet today represents the largest ungoverned space on planet earth. Never before in the history of mankind has there been so much power in the hands of so many people across so many places. There is more digital content that is created every two days than the amount of content between the dawn of civilizations and 2003,” Tewari said.
The plan to establish the bureau had run into trouble as the Planning Commission had in June objected to the expected expenditure for the new wing as being “excessive”. The Plan panel had further pointed out that this expenditure would divert resources from an outreach effort for rural areas. The commission had also asked about the need for a separate section outside the Press Information Bureau.
