NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notices to various ministries of the central government on a PIL seeking modification of internet laws to make watching pornography a non-bailable offence.

A bench of Chief Justice Altamas Kabir and Justices A R Dave and Vikramjit Sen issued notice on Kamlesh Vaswani's petition saying existing laws had failed to prohibit proliferation of internet pornography and alleged that it was affecting the younger generation and resulting in increasing sexual assaults on women.

Appearing for the petitioner, senior advocate M N Krishnamani said the government urgently needed to take pro-active steps to block all pornographic websites as they were affecting the "peace of mind, health and wellness, happiness and human potential".

"Absence of internet laws encourages watching porn videos since it is not an offence. This has led to a situation where more than 20 crore porn videos/porn clippings are available in the Indian market , which have been downloaded from the internet," the petitioner said through counsel Virag Gupta.

Interestingly, many lawyers stood up before the bench in support of the petition, with one of them, Vijay Panjwani, saying the Information and Technology Act was ineffective to deal with the potentially explosive situation created by free availability of pornography, including child pornography, as only a government servant could be a complainant for action against service providers.

The petitioner said, "Porn is always on demand and watching brutal form of porn increases the viewer's appetite for similar actions within society. Pornographic literature seeks to confirm that people are objects who can be sold and bought in the market. It treats sex as a commodity and exploits it commercially. When exploitation of sex is accepted in society, then all characteristics attributable to commercial exploitation also become acceptable which is to maximize profit."

Vaswani sought a direction from the court to the Centre to formulate a national policy, action plan and draft a separate law to counter the proliferation of pornography on the internet.