Approach Centre, BJP to Google Street

Two officials from Google Inc, New Delhi, Geetanjali and Venkatesh Hariharan, had a meeting with the BJP MLC Ashwath Narayan, BJP media cell in charge Prakash Shesharaghavachar, Vivek Reddy from party’s legal cell and Chennamallikarjun from BJP’s communication cell on Monday to remove the hurdles from its first ambitious project in India.

The Google officials tried to convince the BJP State unit members that they would ensure that the Google Street will not show pictures of strategically sensitive zones but only of popular places like shopping zones and places of historical importance to tourists. The BJP leaders were told that the Google Street was operational in 27 countries and in all the places there were some screening mechanisms and guidelines for data protection system.
When the BJP leaders queried about the screening mechanisms in India, the Google officials told them they are yet to find out any such mechanisms existing in the country.

The BJP communication and legal cell admitted that India had no such screening mechanism, even though the country was very much on the terror radar. There was also no data protection authority in the country to decide on the images of sensitive locations in facilities like Google Earth or Google Street, they said.

The project was launched a couple of months ago, but it had to wind up, after the police commissioner felt that its images could pose a security threat.