WCD to roll out portals to tackle child porn

Barely a week after the Centre told the Supreme Court that it is going to come up with a new portal to curb child pornography, the Women and Child Development ministry has said that two portals will come up in the next three months.

A sub-project of the Cyber Crime Prevention against Women & Children (CCPWC), the portals will be funded under the Nirbhaya Fund. One of the portals will work on escalating and reporting child sex abuse material as well as rape, gangrape and revenge porn videos. Another portal will work on prosecution.

WCD joint secretary Chetan Sanghi told DNA that in a year, the ministry also wants to work on building a portal backed by Artificial Intelligence, which will seek out such content on its own. At the moment, the Centre is working on a system where the DNA hashing of such content leads the agencies to such content.

To that end, the ministry on Wednesday held a national-level consultation attended by representatives of NASSCOM, BPRD, National Law University Delhi, the Data Security Council of India, Facebook, Twitter, as well as Civil society representations from Unicef, Aarambh, Cyber Peace Foundation, Childline and Tulir participated, along with officials from WCD, ministry of home affairs and ministry of electronics and information technology.

While the Centre's intent is to go at all forms of offensive pronographic content, there will be no amendments made to existing laws. "Currently, a complaint is first processed at a police station, then it is shifted to the cyber crime cell, who then files a report. The report is then sent to MEITY, who sends an order to the department of telecom, who then removes it. We want to fasttrack the process to within 24 hours, where complaints are processed at the tip of a phone button," said Sanghi.