The city has joined the rest of India in debating whether adult pornography should be filtered or not.

Acting on the directives of the Supreme Court, the Union ministry of communications and IT sent a notice (A copy of the notice is with The Telegraph) last Friday to all Internet service providers (ISPs) to block 857 websites under the provisions of Section 79 (3) (b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Like rest of the country, residents, too, have expressed their views both in support as well as against the restriction on the pornographic websites. City-based clinical psychologist Binda Singh is of the view that restriction on pornographic websites is completely justified but proper sex education at the primary level is also the need of the hour.

"I completely support the move of the government to block pornographic websites as it inflicts negative aspects related to sex, especially among children, which also leads to other abnormality in their behaviour. Recently, I came around a case of a teenager whose parents complained that he could not sleep at night but slept through the day. Later, it was discovered that he was watching porn all night," Binda said.

Deliberating on the need for sex education, she said: "The fundamental reason behind inclination towards porn among youth is inquisitiveness about sex. Parents refrain from talking about sex and sex education is negligible in our education system as of now. This has made issues such as sex and masturbation which are otherwise normal more like a taboo in our society. Thus, there is a need of proper sex education among children through experts."

Majority of college-going girls have hailed the restriction on pornographic websites. "I am happy that the government has taken this decision to filter obscene material on the web. These things should be kept in private but Net is not a private place. Till the technology is not available to control the content for all such sites, these measures are a must," said Bhawna Sen, a student of Magadh Mahila College.

However, there is another section of girls, who are not in complete support of the restriction. "It should not be blocked but it should be restricted from access to children and vulnerable sections of the society like illiterate and semi-literate, who have questionable sense of judgement. The ban is an intrusion to personal freedom. It is a violation of principles of transparency in a democratic country," said a student of Patna Women's College requesting anonymity.

D.M. Diwakar, sociologist and director of AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies, came up with rather a balanced view on this issue. "Porn is positive in the sense that it leads to proliferation of raw information on sex in the absence or lack of proper sex education. However, it also shows sickness of mind or a pervert mindset, when it turns into addiction. Thus, there is a need for sensitive regulation on access to pornographic material through security checks on the Internet," said Diwakar.

Lawyers, on the other hand, claimed that the access to porn as such is not an offence. "Hosting and transmitting pornographic content is punishable under provision of Section 67 of the IT Act, 2000, but viewing porn in private is not counted as an offence as per law," said Ravi Parmar, a lawyer practising at Patna High Court.

Several youngsters in the city, however, said the court or the government would find it difficult to filter content of the websites as most of the sites are managed by servers located even in tiny islands across the world. "Such filter would not have any impact on someone who has access to websites, which allow file download or file sharing. People can take the Torrentz way also to have access to pornographic files," said Nitesh, a final-year student of history. He added that many of his friends get porn video clips on instant messenger services like WhatsApp also.