Registration of periodicals moves online as Union govt. notifies new Act

The new Press and Registration of Periodicals (PRP) Act, 2023, has come into force and the old Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867, now stands repealed.

The Centre has notified the new law and the associated rules in its official gazette. Accordingly, the

Act is effective from March 1. The registration of newspapers and periodicals has moved online in the Press Sewa Portal, while the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI) has been renamed as the Press Registrar General of India (PRGI), said the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry on Saturday.

“In tune with the ethos of Digital India, the new Act provides for an online system for facilitating the registration of newspapers and other periodicals in the country. The new system replaces the existing manual, cumbersome processes involving multiple steps and approvals at various stages which were causing unnecessary hardships to the publishers,” it said. Earlier, Union I&B Minister Anurag Singh Thakur had launched the Press Sewa portal, through which various applications as mandated by the new Act can be submitted online.

“The Press Sewa portal ensures paperless processing and offers services with esign facility, digital payment gateway, QR codebased digital certificates for instant download, online system for providing intimation by printing presses, percentage of probability for title availability, online access to registration data for all publishers, filing of annual statements, among others. It also intends to put in place a chatbotbased interactive grievance resolution mechanism,” said the Ministry.

The portal is accompanied by a new website with all the related information and a userfriendly interface. The new Act removes books and journals from the purview of registration necessitated by the old law. It defines a periodical as “any publication including a newspaper which is published and printed at regular intervals containing public news or comments on public news but does not include a book or a journal of scientific, technical, and academic nature”.

Therefore, “book, or a journal including a book or journal of scientific, technical and academic nature” does not require registration with the PRGI.