India's Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) was sold as a fast, free, digital alternative to litigation for users whose content is removed. By September 22, 2026 it had received 63,353 appeals and decided 30,375, according to MediaNama's reporting on SFLC.in's dashboard tracking. More than 30,000 are pending, up from 174 last November. Some creators now wait four months or more.
The case for the GAC
The strongest defence of the GAC is simple. Before Rule 3A was added to the IT Rules 2021 in October 2022, a user whose post was removed could complain to a platform's grievance officer, and if that failed, go to court. Court is slow and costly, and most users never get there. A government-appointed appellate body that anyone can approach online, within 30 days of the grievance officer's reply, is a real improvement on that. The GAC's own FAQ describes the process as entirely digital, with SMS and email notifications and compliance reports that platforms must publish. Rule 3A(4) also commits the committee to endeavour to resolve appeals within 30 calendar days, as Internet Freedom Foundation notes.
That design goal is now being missed by a wide margin.
What the numbers show
MediaNama reports that before May 2026 the GAC handled roughly 100 to 150 complaints a month. Then filings jumped into the thousands. Officials quoted in the report suggested possible causes: automated submissions, users abroad discovering the mechanism, and middlemen filing bulk complaints using Aadhaar numbers. Those explanations may be partly right. But a body meant to give timely redress cannot be sized for 150 appeals a month if its own rules invite anyone to file.
The backlog is not just a statistic. On May 18, 2026 the Delhi High Court ordered the GAC to decide one petitioner's appeal within 30 days of receiving the order, after it had sat unresolved for more than 63 days, per the IFF account linked above. When a court has to enforce the statutory timeline on the body created to avoid court, the mechanism is failing at its purpose.
The process design also compounds delay. According to MediaNama, users cannot see the platform's response to their appeal, which makes rebuttal impossible. Some decisions reportedly proceed without examining the evidence submitted. And because grievance officers have a three-month window to respond, appeals over officer silence rarely succeed. A creator can lose most of a quarter before the GAC even sees the case.
Three routes, and only one has an appeal
The GAC covers only one of the ways content disappears. A copyright strike goes through the platform's own process. A community-guidelines removal goes to the grievance officer and then the GAC. A removal following a government notice often goes nowhere. MediaNama's report on cartoonist Satish Acharya's Instagram account shows this. His account has been withheld in India since September 28, and the notice on one restricted cartoon cites Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act. The user receives a banner, not the notice or its reasoning.
That matters because the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India upheld Section 69A blocking only because it comes with safeguards: a committee, a reasoned order and a hearing. Section 79(3)(b) is a condition on platform immunity. It has no comparable procedure. According to MediaNama, the Supreme Court stayed four High Court cases on whether it can work as a blocking power and transferred them to itself in August 2026, with the matter last coming up on August 10. Meanwhile the notices keep flowing: roughly 1,275 a day between March and July 2026, with nearly one lakh to Instagram, about 80,000 to Facebook and about 15,000 to YouTube, mostly through the Home Ministry's Sahyog portal.
What proportionate redress would look like
A pro-innovation, pro-speech reading does not require abolishing the GAC. It requires making it work and keeping it honest about what it covers.
- Triage by design. Rule 3A already sets a 30-day target. Publish monthly disposal times, and separate bulk or duplicate filings from individual creator appeals so genuine cases are not buried.
- Two-sided transparency. Let appellants see the platform's response and reply to it. An appeal where one side cannot see the other's argument is not an appeal.
- Reasoned notices. Whatever the Supreme Court decides on Section 79(3)(b), affected users should receive the notice and its stated grounds, as Shreya Singhal's logic for Section 69A implies.
- Capacity that scales. A three-member committee handling tens of thousands of appeals needs more decision-makers, or a first-level review layer, not just an online portal.
The risk of ignoring this is not abstract. A takedown regime where redress takes four months, or does not exist, teaches creators to self-censor and platforms to over-remove. Both hurt the open internet, and both hurt the creator economy that India wants to grow. Speed of redress is part of the rule of law online.
The backlog is a warning about how India's content-governance architecture was built: generous in what it lets the state and platforms take down, thin in what it gives users back. The Supreme Court will decide the constitutional question on Section 79(3)(b). The government does not need to wait for that ruling to fix the queue.