New Delhi: Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook billionaire hosted PM Modi at a Town hall in the US recently and is now on a visit to India. He visited the Taj Mahal, and called it stunning. But what may be more stunning are the revelations that its contract with the Goverment of India may contain.

The Contract that allows facebook to operate in the country, has been submitted to the Delhi High Court in response to a PIL by former BJP ideologue K N Govindacharya that the Indian government has extended illegal financial gains to Facebook by surrendering all rights on public records.

In an affidavit, the Centre has annexed the contract with the social media giant where it discloses that an individual or a government entity using the site gives consent to “having personal data transferred to and processed in the United States”.

The HC is likely to examine the contract on Wednesday. It had earlier directed the Centre to place before it the contracts with social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube.

“Why are you not filing the contracts? Why are you hiding them from us? What is the hesitation? It has been five months since our May 7, 2015 direction,” a bench of justices Badar Durrez Ahmed and Sanjeev Sachdeva had noted on the last date of hearing.

On May 7, the HC had first ordered the Centre to furnish the “exact nature of the contracts which have been entered into by the government/government departments with the social media sites on the internet”. The court wants to study the contracts and their exact wordings to verify allegations that the government has failed to protect privacy and information of the Indian public.

Two months later, the HC again asked the Centre to “come out” with details of the contracts it had with social media sites to find out if these websites had licenses to the intellectual property rights of the contents uploaded

The HC said it appears when anything is uploaded on social media sites, the websites get a license to the intellectual property rights of the content without paying any royalty. It wondered if the Indian government is aware of this, because when the government gives royalty-free license to Facebook without anything in return, “it was akin to (giving) state largesse”.

In his PIL, filed through advocate Virag Gupta, Govindacharya has questioned the use of social media by government departments. He claims the “central government has become the biggest marketing agent for social media sites”. Gupta has alleged the government’s contracts with these companies ensure it is “transferring/surrendering” all intellectual property rights of the data being uploaded on these sites.