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We Still Await the Copy of the ITA-2000 Amendments Bill
Five days have passed since the ITA-2000 amendments bill was tabled in the Parliament on 15th December. Still, MIT have not been able to put a copy of the Bill on their website. The delay reflects badly on the efficiency of the department that leads the IT developments of the country. Since the session of the Parliament is now closed, the Bill will be taken for discussion only in the next session. This is of course welcome since we now may have some time for discussion of the proposed amendments in public.
As we wait for the MIT website to post the copy of the Information Technology Act 2000 Amendment Bill which was tabled in the Parliament on December 15th one wonders. Should it take 5 days or more for the draft to be put up on the site considering the importance of the proposed legislation? ..Or is IT the simple attitude of "Who Cares?..".Or is it how the website has all along been taken care of?
We all know that the discussion forum in the site was taken over first by spammers and then by hackers. Finally instead of meeting the challenge, the department removed the discussion forum al together so that no body can hack into it.
The lack of updation has been a trait of many e-Governance websites and it is no surprise that www.mit.gov.in falls into the same category. The adverse impact of such laxity can however be seen in the following picture which shows the copy of the ITA-2000 that exists on the website today (December 20, 2006), and does not take into account the changes that have happened since February 2003!. If three years have not been sufficient for updation then a delay of 5 days hardly matters.
On the other hand the current version of the Act is available at Naavi.org site. The page corresponding to the above page at Naavi.org is shown below. Watch the section 1(4)(a) to spot the difference.
The laxity of MIT website managers in updating the site puts a question mark on the reliability of information found there in. Further, in view of the status of the website as the authorized web site of the Government of India, information available there in would be referred worldwide and the presence of the old version of the ITA-2000 could be misleading all Cyber law observers.
It was very interesting to observe that the "Expert Committee" which recommended the changes to the ITA-2000 which are presently before the Indian Parliament took for reference the old version and finalized its recommendations using it as the base document. It was difficult to digest the fact that the so called "Expert Committee" did not know what was the prevailing version of the Act which they were supposed to modify. If this is the level of expertise that has gone into the preparation of the expert committee's review, it is difficult to respect the suggestions made since they also would be considered as based on the same level of ignorance or callousness.
When posterity discusses the legislative history of the ITA-2006 (The expected new version), the fact that the transformation from ITA-2000 to ITA-2006 was based on the suggestions of an "Expert Committee" not knowing which was the version which they were supposed to amend would leave a permanent question mark on the quality of the amendments proposed.
Recently MIT has designated specific persons in the department as responsible for the content in the website. Hopefully there will be better accountability for the content from now on and such delays and errors would be avoided in future.
Naavi
December 20, 2006
