Starred Question ★ 9

F. No. SI/Q9/AIRPLANE-MODETo: The Ministries of Home Affairs & Communications, and Every Officer With the Switch

World Champion of the Off Switch, Six Years Running

India switched off the internet more than any country on earth for six consecutive years, 2018 through 2023, and lost the title only to Myanmar's junta. Kashmir spent 552 days offline, Manipur 212, and whole states go dark for recruitment exams. The same government routes rations, wages and payments through the network it keeps disconnecting.

The question, for the Government of India

In 2015 the Prime Minister declared digital connectivity a basic right in the making. Since then, India has led the world in revoking it, six years running, and now trails only a military junta. So one request, pending since January 2020: publish the orders. Not restore the internet, just publish every suspension order, with its necessity and proportionality reasoning, as the Supreme Court directed. If cutting off 27 million people to catch one man was lawful, the paperwork will be a pleasure to produce. If the paperwork does not exist, kindly explain which basic right was switched off by an order nobody wrote down.

World No. 1, 2018-2023 · Losing Only to a Junta

The record, by exhibit

The scoreboard, kept by Access Now because no Indian ministry keeps one: 2018, India imposed 134 of the world's 196 documented shutdowns, 67% of the planet, with runner-up Pakistan on 12. 2019: 121, more than the rest of the world combined. 2020: 109 of 155, while the runners-up managed single digits. 2021: 106. 2022: 84, which was 45% of Earth. 2023: 116 of 283, a sixth consecutive world title. In 2024 India finally lost the crown, 84 to 85, to Myanmar, a country run by a military junta since the coup, and Access Now still noted India's count was the most of any democracy. 2025: 65, second again, “alarmingly high for a democracy”. SFLC.in's stricter, order-based tracker stands at 927 shutdowns as of this filing. Other countries treat the internet as infrastructure. India treats it as a privilege revocable by any District Magistrate with a template.
Kashmir got the world record: 552 days of dead or degraded internet from 5 August 2019 to February 2021, the longest shutdown ever imposed by a democracy anywhere. Of India's 690 shutdowns from 2012 to mid-2023, 418 were in Jammu & Kashmir, and through 2020 the administration issued fresh suspension orders roughly every two weeks while doctors pleaded for connectivity mid-pandemic. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce put the cost at $2.4 billion and around five lakh jobs. In December 2025 the administration innovated further, banning unauthorised VPNs for two months and reportedly penalising some 800 users, with phone searches for banned apps. First the internet was cut, then the workarounds were criminalised. The file does not record what the residents were supposed to do instead. It was never about what the residents were supposed to do.
Manipur, 3 May 2023: as ethnic violence began, the state cut the internet and kept it off for 212 days, disconnecting 3.2 million people through the precise months when evidence, appeals for help and independent reporting mattered most. The videos that finally forced the country to look at Manipur surfaced in spite of the blackout, months late. The internet returned on 3 December 2023, went off again across nine districts in November 2024, and again in Ukhrul in February 2026. Whatever the shutdowns were meant to suppress, the violence itself continued on schedule.
The switch also answers ordinary politics. Punjab, March 2023: mobile internet and SMS were cut for all 27 million residents to assist the search for one man, on orders digital rights groups described as a fill-in-the-blank template. Haryana, February 2024: seven districts dark for the farmers' protests, extended at least six times, while the X accounts of farm unions and journalists were withheld on legal demand. December 2019: the CAA protests drew shutdowns across 15 states, including the first ever imposed on the national capital. September 2025: after police firing killed four statehood protesters in Leh, the response included a curfew, an internet cut, and the arrest of Sonam Wangchuk under the NSA. The pattern is consistent: where the state meets its citizens at their angriest, the first casualty is their ability to tell anyone.
And then there are the exams. Rajasthan, September 2021: mobile internet off from 6 AM to 6 PM across Jaipur and several districts so nobody could cheat on a teacher-recruitment test. West Bengal, March 2022: internet suspended across parts of seven districts on eight separate class 10 board exam days, paired with a no-washroom-breaks rule for the first 100 minutes. Jharkhand, September 2024: the whole state's mobile internet, off for two mornings for a staff-selection exam, until the High Court barred any further shutdown without its leave and observed that the state's quiet extension of the blackout to broadband could amount to criminal contempt. SFLC counted five region-wide exam shutdowns in 2024 alone. In May 2026, Faridabad cut mobile internet for a slum demolition drive, citing rumours. Somewhere in every district sits an officer empowered to disconnect a crore of people because somebody's nephew might WhatsApp an answer key, and the officer uses it.
None of this survives contact with the law, which is the scandal inside the scandal. In Anuradha Bhasin, January 2020, the Supreme Court held that indefinite shutdowns are impermissible, that every order must be necessary, proportionate and published, and that secret law is no law. The compliance record: Human Rights Watch counted 127 further shutdowns in the three years after the judgment, orders routinely unpublished. Parliament's own Standing Committee, reporting in December 2021, found the Department of Telecom did not know whether states had even constituted the mandatory review committees, that no ministry had ever studied a shutdown's impact, and that no database of orders exists. The government's eventual response was the Telecommunications Act 2023 and fresh Rules in 2024, which re-enact the power with, per SFLC, no judicial member on the review committee, no public reporting, and no penalty for an unlawful order. Asked to publish the orders, the state instead republished the power.
The bill arrives regardless. India's 2020 shutdowns were the most economically damaging on earth at $2.8 billion. 2023: $585.4 million across 7,956 offline hours touching 59.1 million people. 2024: $322.9 million more. And the design makes the poor pay first: rations are Aadhaar-authenticated online, MGNREGA wages require geo-tagged app attendance twice a day, payments run on UPI, and roughly 96% of Indian internet users are wireless-only, so a “mobile-only” suspension is a total blackout for anyone who cannot afford a leased line. Human Rights Watch titled its report with a Rajasthan worker's summary: “No internet means no work, no pay, no food.” The government computerised the safety net, then kept cutting the wire it hangs from.
For the diplomatic record: the Prime Minister, 2015: “Digital connectivity should become as much a basic right as access to school.” In October 2024, New Delhi hosted the ITU's World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, welcoming 194 member states to set the future of global connectivity, in the same year Access Now ranked India the top shutdown perpetrator among the world's democracies. The hosts presumably kept the venue's Wi-Fi on. Delegates are advised that this courtesy is not extended to Manipur.

The citations, in full

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