India has one of the largest Internet users in the world. Therefore, whenever the central or state government decides to cut internet access for this A reason or one more, A large number of people and businesses are affected; This results in a large monetary loss.
according to this A new Top10VPN report – A site tracking VPNs and privacy tools – India lost about $ 2.7 billion due to Internet shutdown in 2020 – more than the combined total of the next 10 countries on the charts.Last year, India was offline for 8,927 hours longer than any other country.. According to internetshutdowns.in – A site that tracks Internet blockages in India – The country had 83 shutdowns in 2020.
The biggest contribution to India’s statistics is the shutdown of the Internet in Jammu and Kashmir, where it escaped August 2019 to March 2020. The government blocked the Internet in the region in August 2019 – home to more than 7 million people – followed by the abolition of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted autonomy to the Jammu and Kashmir state government in some administrative areas. In March 2020, when the state government lifted the ban on access to major sites, a ton of mobile users were still using 2G to get online, as it was the only service for them.
A report by the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce has suggested The region lost $ 5.3 billion due to Internet shutdowns and restrictions.. While it is difficult to say which figures are more accurate, it is clear that people in India suffered major losses as a result of blocking Internet connectivity.
Earlier in the year, the government had also shut down the Internet in various areas due to opposition to the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Provides citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from select neighboring countries.
Ironically, the central government announced last year that it was blocking Internet access in many areas. It plans to bring fiber-optics based broadband to all Indian villages in the next three years. While it may be very good for people living in those parts to get high-speed internet, all these efforts would be in vain if there were a large number of internet shutdowns in the country.