Reproaching the state of antipathy despite dwindling gender ratio in various states, the Supreme Court Wednesday ordered search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing to immediately stop displaying advertisements relating to pre-natal sex determination tests. A Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and P C Pant issued the interim order in the wake of exigency of the matter and said that removal of obnoxious content from the Internet search engines was the first step towards tackling the problem. “It is directed that the respondents, namely, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft shall not advertise or sponsor any advertisement which would violates Section 22 of the PC-PNDT Act, 1994. If any advertisement is there on any search engine, the same shall be withdrawn forthwith by the respondents,” ordered the bench. Under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act of 1994, gender determination and gender selection are offences and anyone who abets such an act, either by giving such information about a foetus or by helping in removing a foetus, is liable to be punished. The apex court bench also directed the Internet search engines to upload the restraint order on their policy pages as also on the pages containing “terms and conditions of service” respectively. “India is suffering so much because of sex ratio, but still there is a state of antipathy. Despite being banned, selective abortion is taking place and it is a growing problem for this country. This must stopped,” observed the court, while fixing February 11 as the next date of hearing in the case. It also recorded the statements of Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar that the government authorities would take down all the objectionable contents relating to prenatal gender determination in case the search engines cooperate in providing the URLs, IP addresses and some other relevant information about the web links that were uploading the content. In line with the government’s affidavit, Kumar also asserted the such blocking on key-words could also be effectively done by the search engines since they had the relevant technology, deep-domain knowledge, expertise as well as access to the the respective mathematical algorithms to do so. The bench would hear the Internet companies on the next date on the issue of complete blocking of the content. It was hearing a PIL by activist Sabu Mathew George, who has said that the search engines violated Indian laws by displaying prenatal sex determination ads.
