The Supreme Court is set to pronounce its judgement today on pleas seeking 100 per cent verification of VVPATs with votes punched into electronic voting machines (EVMs). A bench of Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Justice Dipankar Dutta will give the judgement around 10:30 am. NGO Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) and others are among the petitioners in the case.
During the hearing on the petitions on April 24, the Supreme Court had said the court cannot “control the elections” or issue directions simply because doubts have been raised about the efficacy of the polling machines. The batch of petitions alleged the EVMs can be manipulated to influence the results.
The Centre has asked French officals, in a meeting held earlier in April, to approve the extradition of liquor baron Vijay Mallya “without preconditions”, The Indian Express reported today citing sources. Mallya’s extradition was raised in the 16th meeting of the India-France Joint Working Group on Counter Terrorism, held on April 15. On Thursday, the Delhi High Court listed in August WhatsApp and Meta’s 2021 pleas challenging a provision of the 2021 Information Technology Rules for social media intermediaries, requiring them to identify the first originator of information. WhatsApp and Meta’s have challenged Rule 4(2) of the 2021 IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules which requires “significant social media intermediaries” providing primarily messaging services to “enable the identification of the first originator of the information.” This could be required by a court order or an order of the competent authority, as per the IT (Procedure and Safeguards for interception, monitoring and decryption of information) Rules, 2009.
