How India’s internet shutdowns are disrupting its economy—and creating fertile ground for misinformation

In July 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed an audience of more than 15,000 in Delhi. Clad in a crisp all-white kurta, Modi declared, “I dream of a digital India where 1.2 billion connected Indians drive innovation.” That speech signaled the commencement of the government’s Digital India campaign, an ambitious effort aimed at establishing India as a future digital superpower.

The ensuing near decade has seen the Indian government establish an extensive digital infrastructure, leading to more people embracing and relying on an internet connection for everything from accessing government services and healthcare to making cashless transactions. At the start of 2024, India’s internet penetration rate stood at 52.4% of the total population with the country having over 751.5 million active internet users. But as the government has increased the country’s dependence on the internet, it has regularly begun cutting that access off.

For the past five years, India has emerged as the world leader when it comes to shutting down the internet—and it does so for a myriad of reasons, from quelling violence and curbing protests to preventing students from cheating on their school exams.

“There is digital India on one side . . . and then, on the other hand, when there is a situation where you are not confident of maintaining law and order, one of the first things that happens is an internet restriction,” says Prateek Waghre, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, which works to defend online freedom and privacy in India.

In 2022, India recorded 84 internet shutdowns—more than there had been in Ukraine, which logged 22 internet disruptions that year amid war with Russia. In the first six months of 2023, India imposed almost as many shutdowns as it did in all of 2022. And while they’ve become more commonplace in India, these shutdowns have extensive consequences. Losing internet connection wreaks havoc on the everyday lives of people in affected areas, the Indian economy, and the ability for people to access accurate information about the events that cause the shutdowns in the first place.

The country’s longest shutdown, which lasted for 552 days beginning in August 2019, stands as a key example of how regular people are affected by communications being cut off. Begun when India’s government revoked the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir, the communications blackout—which coincided with deployment of thousands of troops to the region in anticipation of widespread protests—completely disrupted daily life. It left 500,000 people in the region unemployed—from hundreds of thousands of local textile workers to people like Ali Mehdi, a financial services consultant based in Srinagar whose real name is being withheld at his request.

Lack of internet meant he was unable to carry out his daily work, which led to a lot of economic anxiety. “We have families to feed . . . we have concern of our kids who have to study and do online classes,” he says. Medhi says shutdowns like the one he experienced—which the Kashmir Chambers of Commerce and Industry says cost telecom companies about $480,000-$600,000 per day—also undercut the Digital India message, disincentivizing investment in areas that might be targeted for service shutdowns. “People will think 10 times before venturing into this kind of a place where things are uncertain,” he says.

Though shutdowns that last as long as the one in Jammu and Kashmir aren’t as common, experts say it set a dangerous precedent for even short disruptions to be handed down amid civil disruptions.

In March 2023, the entire state of Punjab faced a three-day internet blackout to track down a Sikh preacher fighting for a separate Sikh state. This move impacted 30 million people and brought economic activity in the region to a complete standstill—while also being easily circumvented via tools like VPNs, which can get around blocked traffic by routing browsing through foreign servers. “The really motivated actors will find a way around [internet suspension] in some shape or form, but who ultimately bears the brunt of it is the common citizen who has done nothing wrong,” IFF’s Waghre says. He suggests the move constitutes “enforcing collective punishment” on people who have nothing to do with the initiation of violence.

In early May 2023, Manipur—a state in northeast of India—experienced deadly ethnic clashes between two groups. As a result, on May 3, the state shut off the internet, claiming it was an effort to maintain law and order. But what began as a short internet blackout dragged on for months, bringing education and business activities to a grinding halt.

Carried out despite the 2020 ruling from India’s Supreme Court that restored Jammu and Kashmir’s connection and declared indefinite suspensions of internet service to be unlawful, Manipur’s blackout prevented people from accessing online lectures, making digital transactions, or even extracting money from the ATMs. Human Rights Watch documented that workers dependent on rural employment guarantee schemes were unable to mark their attendance on a government app and as a result, could not access their wages due to unavailability of the internet.

Manipur has also become emblematic of how communications blackouts can simply allow for violence to go unwitnessed, rather than rein it in. In mid-July 2023—more than two months after the incident it depicted, a video began circulating from Manipur that showed a group of armed men parading naked women through the street and sexually assaulting them. At the time, the Internet Freedom Foundation said that the internet shutdown “has obstructed people outside Manipur from being aware of the ground realities and violence that is taking place in the state,” where the conflict killed some 140 people.

Although one of the stated reasons behind the internet shutdown was to curb misinformation from spreading, experts say that this move in fact had the opposite effect.

“The claim that internet shutdowns will prevent misinformation should be looked at with a lot of suspicion,” says Gurshabad Grover, a technologist and legal researcher based in New Delhi. “When you do not have access to the internet, you do not have access to legitimate sources of news. In fact, you have less access to government information itself. In that case, people will look for information . . . through very informal networks and that might actually increase the chances of getting misinformed.”

The inability to fact-check information due to the absence of internet access is even more perilous, according to Osama Manzar, founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation, who adds that “any misinformation becomes rumor—and rumor becomes absolutely lethal.”

Experts say part of the rationale behind these shutdowns is for the government to save face. Because of the suspension, people outside of Manipur were unable to see the extent to which the state had failed to quell the violence. “For any government, such a long-lasting or such a long-sustained violence is an embarrassment,” Manzr says. “So, cutting the information link is avoiding more embarrassment.”

IFF’s Waghre puts it more succinctly. “I think there is rarely a situation that justifies an internet shutdown,” he says. “It should really be a measure of last resort, and it should be as narrow and as short as possible.”

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