With 134 million children countrywide having access to mobile phones and the Internet, there’s high probability that they are viewing inappropriate online content including porn. Decades of research has highlighted that viewing pornography is associated with anti-social outcomes, and that younger the age at which children are exposed to porn, the more deleterious the impact in terms of shaping sexual behaviour and attitudes in adulthood – Muskan Arora, Sanchea Sandeep Daniel & P. Mini Although on most social issues, post-independence India’s community of liberals who dominate the academy and media, have made significant contributions to the national development effort, especially by advocating a secular state, gender equality, and reservation of quotas for the historically oppressed scheduled castes and tribes and latterly OBCs (other backward castes/classes) in academia and government, on some issues they have got it totally wrong. One of them is in the choice of the economic development model. Ignoring the sub-continent’s five millennia-old tradition of free enterprise, in the mid-1950s they endorsed the Soviet-inspired centrally planned socialist public-sector-led development model which over the past seven decades has almost destroyed the high-potential Indian economy. The sin of adopting an inorganic ideology was compounded by high defence expenditure (the outcome of failures to resolve the Kashmir issue and negotiate a border settlement with China) which has starved the education and health sectors of investment. Currently, misguided and feeble-minded liberals who oppose the beaming of pornography over the Internet are doing the country — and India’s 600 million children and youth in particular — a great disservice. Responding to the demand of several parent groups, lawyers and social activists (including the editors of EducationWorld), in August 2015, the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre ordered all Internet service providers to block public access to 857 pornography websites. However following loud protests against “moral policing” from liberals (including best-selling simpleton author Chetan Bhagat) who seem to be unaware that over 300 million Indians are illiterate and another 500 million are at best functionally literate, the government reversed this order. But subsequently, hearing a PIL (public interest litigation) by Indore-based lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani, the Supreme Court criticised the government for failing to ban sites broadcasting child pornography. Therefore in 2017, the Union government issued an order blocking 3,522 degrading child pornography sites on the advice of Interpol and Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Even as this government order is practised more in the breach than observance, the demand of right-thinking citizens who are aware of education and social ground conditions in India is that all pornography websites should be blocked out. According to a survey released last year by pornhub.com, India is the “third most porn watching country” worldwide after the US and UK. And given the free accessibility of pornographic websites in India, there’s no guarantee that only adults are watching hardcore porn. Children and particularly teens have easy access to the Internet through digital devices such as smartphones and tablets. According to the Unicef Child Online Protection in…
