Ministry.com

A year ago, Hotmail promoter Sabeer Bhatia famously said, "If I had approached an Indian venture capitalist and said I wanted money so I could give e-mail away for free, would I have got a penny?" Consider his chances of success if he had to secure a ministry clearance as well. Therefore, the low-decibel hubbub about the need for a separate infotech ministry causes disquiet, because it betrays the desire to hamstring the only booming sector of the economy. The industry is progressive precisely because it has not had to suffer the ministrations of ministers and bureaucrats. It is business whose real capital lies in vision, flexibility and a response speed close to that of light. The infotech business is built around the Internet, which changes and reinvents itself so fast that it is always one step ahead of legal reform even in the US market. How, then, can an Indian ministry hope to regulate the sector on the basis of Indian law? To propose to put infotech in the steel frame and make it a handmaiden of aminister who knows nothing of its ways seems nothing short of treasonable, for it will strike at the root of India’s future competitiveness.

So far, of course, these proposals are very much in the air. But significantly, they are being lofted by people and institutions who either own expensive legacy systems or were responsible for their installation. They have made money off monopolies established in the permit-quota era and think that it is completely unreasonable of consumers to move on to cheaper systems and deny them their tithe. The issue of Internet telephony is a case in point. This service is either dirt cheap or free, while long-distance telephony in India has one of the highest tariffs in the world. Yet, VSNL blocked access to telephony Websites on two pleas. The first was that high-volume traffic would threaten the national network (so users were as good as traitors); the second, that this lost traffic would deny revenue to the state telecom carriers (in other words, they were the worst sort oftraitors). In addition, the ever-evocative national security icon was trotted out for public worship, though everyone could see that the only insecure people involved in the debate were the fat cats whose empires were threatened.

It is perfectly true that digital communications require some monitoring, and a Bill is expected to be piloted in the next session of Parliament precisely to that end. Our legal establishment is so far behind the times that the author of a minor Internet prank was put behind bars in Calcutta. The financial system is out of date as well: as late as 1996, the Reserve Bank had no clue whether credit card-based Internet transactions were legal or not. There is need for legal reform, but it is absurd to argue that a minister and a whole slew of bureaucrats and file-pushers have to be recruited to administer Internet law. India.com is not in need of Joint Secretary.gov. If there are spare ministerial candidates in search of rehabilitation, they can be accommodated in the many infructuouswings which the government already sports. There is no need to build one from scratch.