RNI constantly re-engineering itself to simplify procedures, says Naidu

Information and Broadcasting minister M Venkaiah Naidu on Friday apprised parliamentarians that the Registrar of Newspapers in India (RNI) has been constantly re-engineering itself to make procedures and process simple.

Naidu said this in a meeting of Consultative Committee of I&B Ministry to discuss on the subject ‘Working of the Registrar of Newspapers for India’ that he chaired.

The minister said the RNI has been constantly re-engineering itself to make procedures and process simpler.

The focus of the Ministry is to make the processes online thereby promoting transparency and accountability, he said.

Naidu further mentioned that in view of the phenomenal growth of the print media sector, particularly after the opening up of economy in 1990s, the print media policy/guidelines had undergone some changes, an official statement said.

There was a need to update contemporaries and revise the legal mechanism in the print sector and to give statutory backing to Print Media Policy and various guidelines, he said and apprised the members about the salient features of the proposed Press and Registration of Books and Publication (PRBP) Bill. Parliamentarians Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Vivek Gupta, Dr. Sanjay Jaiswal, Dev (Moon Moon Sen) Varma, Harivansh, Tapas Paul and Innocent attended the meeting, the statement said.

Meanwhile, broadcasters will no longer have to get renewed the permission to continue to operate if they pay the required annual fee up to 60 days before the due date, a move the government said was in line with its policy of ease of doing business. 

The broadcasters, who have been given permission to run their operations, usually for a period of 10 years, can uplink or downlink content without having to obtain “annual renewal”, Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu said on Friday.

“As part of the government’s initiative of ease of doing business, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has completely done away with the process of obtaining an annual renewal for TV channels in the current form,” he said.