It was a quick one-hour discussion at the Mumbai Digital India Act consultation. Most of the highlights were covered during our live coverage of the event, but for those curious to know what the journalists attending the event had to say about the whole thing – read on: Another closed consultation: My colleague Saravasti and I had to jump through many hoops to attend the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) consultation event. Typically, consultations are supposed to be open to the public. So imagine my shock when this consultation not only required registration but also had a cut-off date for attendee registration by May 20. Thankfully, you can always count on two to three people going rogue, so we managed to get in. It still required finding a contact for the management team and begging for a place inside the discussion hall. Government folks not willing to talk: Struggling to get bytes from stakeholders is a curse as old as time in the field of journalism. However, when there is a government-organised discussion, you would at least expect one member of the Ministry to be willing to speak to you. No such luck. Post-event, no one from the MeitY team was willing to speak to journalists about anything, stating that everything that we needed to hear had been said by Rajeev Chandrasekhar already. Déjà vu? While we did summarise the latest discussion points during the Mumbai event, we felt, and some stakeholders agreed with us, that the first half of…
