India had an internet blackout for 1,655 hours in 2020, throttling 7,272 hours of bandwidth while the total cost of the restriction was $ 2,779 million.
In the year 2020, 280 million US dollars (about 20 thousand crore rupees) were drowned in the country due to internet shutdown. There have been many reasons for the Internet shutdown, but it has caused a lot of damage. Every year, the account of which country is harmed due to internet shutdown is released by the top10vpn portal.
India, Belarus, Yemen and Myanmar are on the top-4 in terms of internet shutdown. According to the report, in the last one year, 8927 hours of internet was closed in India. More than 10 million users were affected by this. The report added that the actual economic impact for India may be even higher than the $2.8 billion figure — which itself was double the losses on account of Internet shutdowns in 2019, with businesses in 2020 anyway hit due to the Covid lockdown. “As in previous years, India continued to restrict Internet access more than any other country — over 75 times in 2020. The majority of these short blackouts were highly targeted, affecting groups of villages or individual city districts, and so were not included in this report, which focuses on larger region-wide shutdowns,” it said.
The report made a separate mention of the extended curbs on Internet use in Kashmir, with suspension of services lasting from August 2019 — when J&K’s special status was scrapped — to March 2020, and still remaining severely throttled, with only 2G access available. Calling it “the longest Internet shutdown in a democracy”, the report says, “The restrictions have negatively impacted the distribution of medicine, businesses and schools.” According to the latest Telecom Regulatory Authority of India data, as of October 31, there were 11.70 million wireless subscribers in the J&K circle.
To calculate the economic cost of Internet shutdowns, the firm used the “Cost of Shutdown Tool” from Netblocks and Internet Society, which uses the Brookings Institution Method. Regional shutdown costs were calculated by determining the region’s economic output as a proportion of its national gross domestic product.
The report defines an Internet shutdown as “an intentional disruption of Internet or electronic communications, rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable, for a specific population or within a location, often to exert control over the flow of information”.
