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Porn video shown during meeting at government building in India

Video continued to play for a further two minutes off-screen, before the technical team managed to stop it

Saptarshi Ray
Delhi
Friday 07 June 2019 13:29 BST
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A meeting of bureaucrats in India was stunned into silence as a pornographic video clip was played for 30 seconds during a meeting of at the state secretariat in Rajasthan.

The meeting, which took place earlier this week, was chaired by Mugdha Singh, the secretary of the food department, at a room in the state government headquarters in Jaipur.

“In the middle of the video conference, an obscene clip started playing on the screen. I immediately called the director and asked him to probe the matter and give a report on this,” Ms Singh told the Press Trust of India (PTI).

She said that 10 people, department officials and representatives from the National Information Centre (NIC) of India, which handles government communications, were present in the room, and supply officers from all 33 districts of the state were participating in the meeting through a video conference.

The meeting was held to review various schemes and programmes, when out of nowhere lewd sounds and images began emanating from one of the laptops hooked up to the video call.

“Decision on the action will be taken on guilty personnel on the basis of the NIC director’s report,” said Ms Singh.

Even as the IT team rushed to find and halt the clip, officials sat flummoxed and red-faced. The initial inquiry revealed that some “privately owned laptops were sourced for the conference”, PTI reported.

One of these laptops accidentally started playing the clip and the footage was relayed to the giant screen. The video continued to play for a further two minutes off-screen, before the technical team managed to stop it.

Naresh Gupta, senior technical director at the NIC, said: “We’ve launched an investigation into the incident. Whoever’s responsible will be found and taken to task.”

The federal government in New Delhi recently began a campaign to prevent pornographic content being accessible in India by blocking hundreds of sites.

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