Centre to introduce 'Press and Registration of Periodicals Bill' during the monsoon session of Parliament

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• Jul 16, 2022 | Poonam Nath

The Center intends to introduce a bill to update the outdated Press and Registration of Books Act, which has been in effect for 155 years.

Digital Desk: The Center plans to introduce a bill to repeal the 155-year-old "Press and Registration of Books Act" and replace it with a more straightforward version that decriminalizes some provisions and includes digital media.

The "Press and Registration of Periodicals Bill, 2022" will be introduced by the government during the monsoon session of Parliament, which starts on Monday.

According to a government communication to the Parliament, the Bill seeks to replace the Press and Registration of Books (PRB) Act, 1867 by decriminalizing the current Act, keeping the procedures of the extant Act straightforward from the point of view of medium/small publishers, and upholding the values of press freedom.

In order to simplify the registration of newspapers and do away with the criminal provisions under the PRB Act, the government first published the Press and Registration of Periodicals Bill in 2017.

Publishers can be fined under the PRB Act for failing to list the printer's name in a newspaper or periodical or for failing to inform a magistrate of the operation of printing presses.

A press registrar general will be established under the proposed Bill and will include digital media in its purview.

The draught bill for 2019 defined news on digital media as information in a digitized form that can be transmitted via the internet, computer, or mobile networks. It included text, audio, video, and graphics.

The purpose of the Bill was to allow the central and state governments to develop appropriate rules to govern the criteria or conditions for issuing government advertisements in newspapers, accreditation of newspapers, and other similar facilities for newspapers.

It also proposed a simple system for registering e-papers and repealing an earlier provision in the PRB Act of 1867 dealing with publisher prosecution.

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