Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told the Lok Sabha on July 22, 2026 that the Centre has disabled public access to 50 OTT platforms over the past two years for allegedly hosting obscene content, invoking Sections 67 and 67A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, Section 294 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and Section 4 of the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986. The written reply, responding to a question on digital addiction among children, framed the action as part of a broader push for an "open, safe, trusted and accountable internet."
The Count and the Legal Machinery
The 50-platform figure is cumulative. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's first major sweep came in July 2025, when it ordered 25 OTT apps and websites — including Ullu and ALTT — blocked for "obscene, vulgar and in some cases, pornographic content," according to the government's own News on Air portal. Vaishnaw's July 2026 disclosure shows the number has roughly doubled since, through a steady drip of smaller orders. The legal route is Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, which lets the government direct intermediaries to disable access to unlawful content, layered on top of the 2021 Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules — the framework that first brought OTT and digital news under a three-tier self-regulation-plus-government-oversight structure, as PRS Legislative Research's tracker of the Rules lays out.
The Case for Intervention
The government's underlying concern is not manufactured. India has one of the world's largest populations of minors with unsupervised smartphone access, and several of the platforms named in the 2025 and 2026 orders were low-budget, subscription-based apps built almost entirely around softcore content with minimal age-gating — a different animal from a mainstream streamer's occasional mature scene. Vaishnaw's reply also pointed to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act's parental-consent requirements for minors' data and cited the Economic Survey's flagging of digital addiction among 15–29 year-olds, per Storyboard18's account of the reply — evidence the ministry is trying to fit obscenity enforcement into a wider child-safety agenda, not acting on obscenity alone. A state with a constitutional obscenity carve-out under Article 19(2) has a legitimate interest in policing content that would fail an obscenity test in any jurisdiction.
Where the Process Falls Short
The problem is not that these platforms were targeted — it's that whole-platform disabling under Section 69A, rather than the notice-and-remove path the 2021 Rules were built around, skips the individualized adjudication the law's own architecture presumes. The Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India upheld Section 69A specifically because it read in safeguards: as legal analysis from ACM Legal notes, the Court "stressed that its safeguards — notice, hearing, and a reasoned order — are not optional," precisely so that a blocked party could challenge the order under Article 226.
"Blocking an entire platform because of objectionable content on a few shows is rarely justifiable" — a proportionality problem, not just a legal technicality, according to ACM Legal's analysis of Section 69A practice.
In practice, blocking orders under Section 69A are treated as confidential by rule, which means the public — and often the platform itself — learns a service is gone before learning why, and rarely sees the reasoning that would let a court test necessity or proportionality. For a catalogue app carrying hundreds of titles, one flagged show can take the entire platform, and every unrelated title on it, dark.
The Innovation Cost
The platforms absorbing these orders are disproportionately small, India-specific streaming apps rather than the Netflixes and Prime Videos with large compliance teams and in-house content review. That is precisely the segment India's OTT policy debate says it wants to nurture — regional-language, low-cost, India-headquartered streaming. A blocking regime that can take down an entire business for a handful of titles, without a published, appealable rationale specific to those titles, raises the cost of building a streaming platform in India relative to importing one. It also does nothing to distinguish genuinely obscene material from merely risqué content that a differently constituted committee might have let stand — the sort of line-drawing obscenity law has always struggled with, now happening behind closed doors.
What Proportionate Enforcement Looks Like
None of this requires abandoning the underlying child-safety goal. It requires the government to use the tools the 2021 Rules already built: flag and require removal of specific episodes or titles first, reserve whole-platform blocking for repeat, uncooperative operators, and publish redacted blocking orders — as Shreya Singhal anticipated — so a proportionality challenge is actually possible rather than theoretical. Fifty platforms in two years is a number the government is now happy to put in front of Parliament. The reasoning behind each one still isn't.