Twitter ready to cooperate with India, will set up team to monitor request, says Kapil Sibal

After a gridlock with the world's largest  microblogging website Twitter in getting accounts of some 'miscreants' blocked, the government has managed to finally get some breakthrough.

Minister for Communications and IT Kapil Sibal told media on Friday that Twitter Inc was ready to cooperate with India. "Twitter is ready to cooperate. It will set up a special team to take up requests from the India to block accounts," Sibal said on the sidelines on a press briefing.

The government has requested Twitter to block some accounts which carry 'communal overtones' in the wake of recent violence in Assam.

Telecom secretary R Chandrasekhar who was also present at the briefing explained to ET that a fast track method would be set up by Twitter to address issues raised by India.

"An arrangement has been made to have a fast track method of dealing with issues which are brought to the notice by India. I don't think any exact timeline has been fixed. But a regular correspondence channel has been set up by the Department of IT. It will bring things to their notice faster to redress them," Chandreshekhar told ET.

Things had come to standstill, when government's requests to block some accounts which were impersonating Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Office were not heeded by Twitter Inc.

Last week, Sibal had admitted to difficulties in working with Twitter. "The difficulty is that Twitter is a site, which operates from outside India and the servers of all such sites are outside the jurisdiction of India. The solution to this problem should be a permanent one," Sibal had said.

Besides, accounts impersonating PMO's official Twitter feed @PMOIndia, government had also requested Twitter to block 28 other accounts, some of which belonged to journalists and rightwing ideologues. These included @i_panchajanya, @barbarindian, @scamsutra, @ekakizunj and @redditindia. The main opposition party BJP slammed the government for curbing freedom of speech.

"Out of 16 accounts blocked, almost all are critics of Congress. This is a Stalinist approach," said Tarun Vijay, national spokesperson for BJP.

The requests for block of content by Indian government is rising every year. The number of content removal requests on Google's platforms ( YouTube, Orkut) by India increased by 49% in 2011 over 2010. Only 29% of India's requests however were complied with, according to a Google Transparency report. Twitter.com has about 16 million members in India, out of the total 500 million users across the world.