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Shashi Tharoor-led parliamentary committee on Information and Technology has flagged the issue of internet shutdowns in India.  |  Photo Credit: PTI

There is a price for the frequent internet shutdowns in the country and it is not cheap. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, led by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor presented a report titled, Suspension of Telecom and Internet Services and Its Impact in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

The report highlights how frequent shutting down of telecom services and the internet affected life and liberty of people. It goes on to say that the frequent internet shutdowns cost the country $2.8 billion in 2020 and called for defining the parameters and a robust mechanism for internet shutdown.

Team Shashi Tharoor has a good reason to be miffed. The governments at both, the Centre and State levels in India have been infamous for frequently shutting down internet services at the drop of the hat. A report by Forbes goes on to say that India shuts its internet down more frequently than any other democracy in the world.At the dawn of this year, the Centre ordered a series of internet lockdowns. In January 2021 alone, the country had seen seven incidences of internet shutdowns which included the ones around the farmers protest site in Haryana and the national capital region. While the internet services were suspended around the protest site and not extended at the protest site, it had nevertheless attracted worldwide criticism.

This was not the only time. Data shows that between 2017 and early 2021, India had witnessed 409 incidences of internet shutdown. The worlds longest internet shutdown was also reported in India when services were blacked out in Jammu and Kashmir for 223 days between August 4, 2019, and March 4, 2020 after Article 370 was abrogatedin the Parliament. Besides J&K, maximum internet shutdowns have been witnessed in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Haryana, and Maharashtra, with blackouts lasting for days at a stretch 21 shutdowns in 2017, five in 2018, and six shutdowns in 2019 lasted for more than three days.

And this provision to shut down the internet has been facilitated by the law. The Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017, under the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) allows temporarily suspending the telecom services, including that of the internet in an area. It can be ordered either by the Union Home Secretary or the State Home Secretary in an event of public emergency or the interest of public safety.

And it is this ambiguity of public emergency that the report by Tharoor and team highlights. As of now, "there is no clear-cut definition of what constitutes a public emergency and public safety" says the report adding that in the light of such ambiguity, shutdowns have been ordered purely based on subjective assessment and reading of the ground situations by district level officers and are largely based on executive decisions.

The committee further added that the suspension rules have been "grossly misused" and this has led to untold suffering to the public, massive economic losses and more importantly, reputational damage to the country.

The committee also pulled up the State governments over the lack of proper records relating to telecom services/internet shutdowns ordered by them and recommended that both DoT and Ministry of Home Affairs should establish a mechanism at the earliest to maintain a centralised database of all internet shutdown orders in the country.

The question now comes to what is to be done in case of a genuine crisis dealing with a public emergency or public safety situation. The committee has an answer. It recommends that instead of shutting down the internet, the government can explore the option of banning of selective services, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. instead of banning the internet as a whole.

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Tharoor and team say net blackouts cost India $2.8 billion in 2020, suggest banning social media for public security - Times Now