If an employee has a contract with the employer that he/she cannot moonlight, the same has to be honoured , said Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar. “Would you like to violate the contract with an employer? The answer is no,” he said. Moonlighting is unethical, he said.

Chandrasekhar’s comments come in the wake of media reports that said he supported moonlighting after Wipro recently sacked 300 employees over alleged moonlighting.

“I never said that I am happy if a person is working with Wipro and moonlighting with TCS. This is unethical. Violating a contract is a violation, and absolutely not permissible. But the future workforce model will be a group of people working as consultants and designing products for companies as collaborative groups. They may do it for five different companies at the same time,” he told businessline at the Pegatron plant, which was inaugurated on Friday.

"However, companies should recognise that many individuals are going to become entrepreneurs in the future and will be looking for starting their own companies. Instead of suppressing that, companies should recognise that and work with them is what I suggested," he said.

New legislations

On the new set of IT legislations planned by the Centre, the Minister said it would be announced soon. It is progressing well, and will be done after extensive public consultations and scrutiny. “We are building a legislative framework for the next 10 years. We wanted to be contemporary, evolvable and modern. We wanted to be a catalyst for young start-ups and allow that to do more,” he said.

To a question on the Tamil Nadu government bringing an Ordinance to ban online gaming, and the Centre’s stand on it, the Minister said it is a tricky issue. Gaming and gambling is a State subject under the Constitution. In online gambling, you cannot say that the border of Tamil Nadu starts here and the border of Goa starts there. It is impossible. The issue is how to regulate online gaming in the context of it being banned in most of the States.

“We have met with the industry, with gamers and had three rounds of public consultations; an empowered committee of secretaries had looked down as to which Ministry should regulate it and how it should be regulated and should there be a new law. You have to wait and watch. We have a framework,” he said.

Online gaming

“Online gaming is a huge opportunity for young entrepreneurs. It is a big part of the digital economy. We don’t want to lose that. But, we don’t want online gambling. Online gaming can be with skills like chess. We want the youngsters and entrepreneurs to develop this in to an industry, but without gambling,” he said.

The Minister added that online gambling is a game of chance as the Supreme Court had said, and wanted it to be banned. All the betting sites from around the world over are available in India are being blocked one-by-one because they are illegal, he said.

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