When Rajasthan's Revenue Officer recruitment exam is held, several million people lose mobile internet — not the few thousand candidates in the hall, but every farmer, gig worker, hospital, ride-hail driver, and small merchant in the affected districts. The same pattern has been repeated, with local variations, in West Bengal, Assam, Gujarat and parts of Bihar across 2024 and 2025. The stated rationale is consistent: prevent cheating via Bluetooth earpieces and Telegram answer-leak rings. The collateral damage is also consistent — and growing harder to justify.
This month Access Now's KeepItOn coalition launched #NoExamShutdown, calling on Indian state governments and the Union Home Ministry to end the practice. The campaign lands at a moment when shutdowns are no longer a fringe administrative tool but a routinised governance reflex. India has led the world in documented internet shutdowns for six consecutive years according to Access Now's annual KeepItOn reports, and exam-related shutdowns have become one of the fastest-growing sub-categories.
A legal regime designed for emergencies, used for logistics
The legal architecture is striking in how poorly it fits the use case. State-level shutdowns in India are typically ordered under the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017, issued under Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 — a colonial-era statute drafted for genuine threats to sovereignty. District magistrates also invoke Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (the successor to Section 144 CrPC) to issue blanket suspension orders.
None of these instruments was designed to address competitive-exam fraud. The Supreme Court's 2020 ruling in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India made this explicit: any shutdown must be necessary, proportionate, least-restrictive, time-bound, and subject to publication and review. The court rejected the idea that shutdowns could be used as a routine administrative measure, holding that indefinite or disproportionate suspensions are unconstitutional under Articles 19 and 21.
Exam shutdowns fail this test on almost every prong:
- Necessity: Cheating is a crime committed by a small, identifiable cohort inside known examination centres. Suspending mobile data for an entire district treats every citizen as a suspect.
- Least restrictive means: Faraday-shielded exam halls, on-site signal jammers within centres, biometric authentication, and randomised question papers are all targeted interventions. India already uses several of them.
- Proportionality: The disruption is felt by tens of millions, including patients calling ambulances, delivery workers losing a day's wages, and businesses unable to process UPI payments — for a problem affecting a few hundred bad actors.
The economic cost is not abstract
India is now the world's third-largest startup ecosystem, and — as Rest of World reported this week — domestic VCs are increasingly dominating early-stage funding, betting on a digital-first consumer economy. That economy runs on always-on mobile data: UPI rails clearing roughly 18 billion transactions per month per NPCI's published statistics, ONDC commerce flows, AgriStack pilots, and an entire generation of small merchants whose only point-of-sale device is a phone. Each blanket shutdown is a tax on that infrastructure.
Independent estimates from research firms such as Top10VPN have for years put India among the costliest jurisdictions for shutdown-driven economic loss. The exact figures are contested, but the direction is not. Exam shutdowns, because they hit dense, economically active regions during business hours, are particularly expensive per hour.
Cheating is real — but the answer is precision, not blackout
To be clear: organised exam fraud is a genuine problem in India. Recruitment-test paper leaks have repeatedly triggered re-exams affecting lakhs of candidates, and the integrity of competitive examinations is a legitimate public interest. The criticism of #NoExamShutdown is not that the state should ignore cheating, but that it should respond like a 21st-century digital economy rather than a 19th-century telegraph regime.
Targeted alternatives are well-known and demonstrably effective:
- In-centre RF shielding and jamming: already permitted under DoT guidelines for exam halls, and far cheaper than the economic cost of a district-wide blackout.
- Question-paper integrity reforms: randomised banks, computer-based testing, and tamper-evident logistics chains attack the supply side of leaks.
- Forensic investigation of leak networks: the Telegram channels and Bluetooth-device suppliers are identifiable. Law enforcement, not network-level censorship, is the correct response.
What the Centre and the courts should do
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT, in its 26th Report (2021) on suspension of telecom services, already recommended clearer guidelines, mandatory publication of shutdown orders, and a review mechanism. Most of those recommendations remain unimplemented at the state level. A few concrete steps would move India toward proportionality:
- The Union Home Ministry should issue an advisory clarifying that exam administration is not a "public emergency" within the meaning of the 2017 Rules.
- State Review Committees, mandated post-Anuradha Bhasin, should be required to publish reasoned orders within 24 hours of any shutdown — including a written explanation of why narrower alternatives were rejected.
- High Courts in states with repeat exam shutdowns should hear pending PILs on the merits rather than allowing the practice to harden into convention.
India does not need to choose between exam integrity and an open internet. It needs to stop pretending that the choice is binary. #NoExamShutdown is, at its core, a request that the state act with the precision a digital economy demands — and that the constitutional standard already requires.