Pending court cases notwithstanding, the Indian government is moving ahead with giving final touches to the full implementation of the country’s digital regulations that came into effect earlier this year in May.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has written to industry organisations, including chambers of commerce, to nominate members for the oversight body under the new social media and intermediary guidelines, Hindustan Times  newspaper reported Sunday.

“This is a confidence-building move and will silence the critics of the Oversight Mechanism that assumed that the committee will only comprise of bureaucrats,” HT reported quoting a person familiar with the matter, “The rules already provide for domain experts in committee. Now it has been specified as to from where the domain experts would be drawn from.”

The oversight body, as envisaged in the IT Rules, would include one member each from the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), one member from the Bar Council of India and a member from the Press Council of India.

The first two shall be experts from the media and entertainment sector, the third a legal expert and the fourth an expert from the field of journalism.

The oversight committee will also have members from government agencies like the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of External Affairs, and Ministry of Defence.

FICCI, CII, BCI and PCI have 10 days to nominate the members. The Secretary, MIB would head this content oversight committee, which would have a final say on the content on streaming and digital news platforms. Of course, the complaint related to content would go through two other steps of self-regulation as mandated by regulation.