India Unplugged
The internet is a utility in India, not a luxury. Turning it off hurts the next half billion.
In 2010, a photo of a mobile phone in the hand of a taxi driver made plenty of news stories. They evoked a sense of pride — India was digitising, and every Indian would benefit. Fast forward ten years, and that would warrant a yawn and a scroll sitting in an Uber or Ola.
The blinding speed of India’s digitization has almost made it a non-story. India has 560 million internet subscribers and is predicted to have 1.1B by 2030. Rarely, if ever, has such a large, diverse group of people come online so quickly.
Look closer though, and you’ll see a newsworthy story in there — the internet is no longer a luxury. It’s a utility, a lifeline, just like water or electricity. Not just to uber riders, but also drivers. And we can’t get enough — every smartphone-owning Indian now consumes 9.8 GB per month, the highest in the world. Can you list then things you do without your phone or the internet at all? And so many, from the Ola driver, to the Zomato delivery executive, to the influencer on social media, depend on it for their livelihoods.
That’s why turning off the internet hurts just like losing power or running water. Life stops. Sadly, India turns the internet off more than any country in the world. Over twice as often as the next ten countries combined. We’re given many reasons for this — from curbing terrorism or preventing law-and-order breaking down to preventing cheating in exams!
As more people are online and do more through the internet, internet shutdowns become a more powerful tool. And they have been increasing. In 2012, for example, the government used this extreme step only thrice. In 2013, five times. In 2014, six times. And since then, we’ve been on an unprecedented upward trajectory that took us well past 130 in 2018.
Most of us probably don’t internalise the difficulty because it’s not in our backyard. It is true that some regions have the majority of a shutdowns. Jammu and Kashmir alone accounts for 56% of the shutdowns in India. But other regions also have their share. Darjeeling saw an unprecedented 100-day internet shutdown in 2017 because of agitations for a new state. Nawada in Bihar went dark for 43 days in the same year because of damage to a Durga idol in a stone pelting incident. December 2019, however, was a wake-up call when many of us in Delhi, Kolkata and Jaipur found ourselves cut off from the internet, given the reason of maintaining law and order during nationwide protests.
The Dream of Digital India pays a heavy price every time we unplug. A study estimated that India lost $1.3 billion in 2019 due to internet shutdowns. To put it in perspective, that’s nearly half of what India spends on ‘anganwadi services’ that provide pre-schooling to 33 million children and food rations to 95 million young children and lactating and pregnant women. Would we snap the supply of education and food to those many children at the first sign of trouble? If not, then why do it with the internet?
The human cost is far greater. Rajkumar Jatav, who runs a small business in Saharanpur, suffered a loss of Rs. 2 lakhs and lost many workers because of an internet shutdown in the district. Shradha Subba, a resident of Darjeeling who studies in Kolkata, had to eat only once a day because her parents were unable to transfer her money during the long shutdown there. Another Darjeeling resident, Pema Namgyal, lost his job because he was unable to work for his Bangalore-based employer.
If we want the NHB to take the Digital India highway to prosperity, we need to minimise the speed bumps we abruptly put up for them. Every time we snap the internet, we interrupt the NHB’s lives and livelihoods. Anxious children waiting for news about their parents; students separated from digital learning; and businesses caught in the digital dark age.
Sure, there are circumstances that may warrant shutting the internet down temporarily. But if the rest of the world can make doing a lot less, we believe that India certainly can! And just like there are transparent guidelines and procedures for judicial process, there should be some for when we turn the internet off, even temporarily.
To make sure we have an India Unbound, Reimagined, and Reinvented, we should reconsider the trend of India Unplugged.
P.s. the individual stories in this article — Jatav, Subba and Namgyal — are drawn from the Centre for Internet and Society’s coffee book on internet shutdowns.
