@ IMC'10 Day 2: The day kick starts with amendments to PRB Act

The second day of the Indian Magazine Congress, organised by the Association of Indian Magazines (AIM), was held in Mumbai on 7th of Sepetember 2010. The initiative by AIM this year has been trying to focus on "Magazines: What's the next big thing".

The second day was scheduled to start at 10.00 am with a panel discussion on "Implications of the Proposed PRB Act". The panel included Mitrajit Bhattacharya, President and Publisher, Chitralekha; Paresh Nath, Editor, Delhi Press Group and Pradeep Gupta, Managing Director, CyberMedia.

The panel discussion was centered on discussing the amendment referred to by the Governement for the Press and Registration of Books Act (PRB) of 1867. The PRB Act was laid down during the British Rule, to primarily record and preserve the copies of earliest Indian publications, and the copies were thereafter deposited in the library of India House in England. However, the government of India has recently suggested a few amendments to the Act and the panel discussed some of the major implications of the suggested amendments.

Nath, started the discussion by stating that even before the amendments could be discussed, the opening copy of the Act under deliberation is itself very vague, as there are wordings like "non serious publishers", "Government of India has decided" and that the existing provisions are insufficient to meet the growth in the print industry. He further added that, the new provisions have only led to more confusion as to what is a newspaper, a journal or a magazine. Nath said so because while the new amendments talks of a newspaper as "a publication of loose folded sheets usually printed on newsprint brought out daily or oftener or at least once a week, containing public news or comments on public news", the meaning for "journal" and a "magazine" also look similar except for the usage of words like "other than a newspaper" and "containing comments or write-ups on specific subjects".

Moving ahead from the ambiguity in the sense of classifying the publications, Nath further pointed out that now the amended Act will require the owner of the printing press to declare himself/herself as the printer, which meant that even if the press owner had no actual control over the matter that was published, he/she will have to face legal charges as and when a misconduct is appropriated towards a publication. At this point the speaker gathered a few positive nods from the audiences.

Elaborating further on the problems of the amendment, Bhattacharya said, "Only the print medium has seen regulations from time to time, and why is that only print as a medium is targeted while there have been excesses in functioning by other media too?" He further added that the new provisions have a distorted explanation for foreign publications and also need to simplify the provisions on title and title verification.

The panel accepted in unanimity on the concluding pointers provided by Gupta that the magazine industry is curious to understand the implementation of the amended act. At the same time the industry wants answer to some key questions like after the ambiguous classification of publications- will magazine publications be provided with the same concessions as earlier?, can the classifications be more identifiable? and if the clause pertaining to titles be more tolerant?

With the aforementioned questions, and seeking to find answers to them, the panel discussion left the audience with a framework to understand the amendments and also put a thought towards understanding the future implementation of the Act. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]

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