"No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food": Internet Shutdowns Deny Access to Basic Rights in "Digital India"

"No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food": Internet Shutdowns Deny Access to Basic Rights in "Digital India" is an 82-page joint report by Human Rights Watch and the Internet Freedom Foundation published on 14 June 2023, written under the lead authorship of Jayshree Bajoria, HRW's Associate Asia Director, with the IFF side led by then–Executive Director Apar Gupta. The report is grounded in nearly seventy interviews conducted across seven Indian states between July 2022 and February 2023 — Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, Assam, Manipur, and Meghalaya — and documents how the country that has shut down the internet more often than any other since 2018 — accounting for 84 of the 187 shutdowns recorded globally in 2022 — has used those shutdowns to deny the welfare-dependent populations of "Digital India" routine access to food rations, employment wages, banking, healthcare, and education.

Argument and methodology

The report's central empirical argument is that internet shutdowns in contemporary India are no longer best understood as ordinary speech restrictions — they are denials of basic socio-economic and constitutional rights, because the Indian state's flagship welfare programmes have themselves been re-engineered as algorithmic and biometrically-authenticated public-service delivery systems that fail entirely without internet connectivity. The argument is built case-by-case against the country's two largest social-protection programmes. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which provides income security for more than 100 million rural households, since January 2023 requires workers to be geo-tagged and photographed twice daily on an online attendance app, conditioning livelihoods on connectivity that disappears during shutdowns. The Public Distribution System under the National Food Security Act delivers subsidised food rations through ration shops that authenticate beneficiaries against the Aadhaar biometric identity database, so that during a shutdown an eligible household with a valid ration card is turned away from the shop where it would otherwise have collected its monthly grain. The report tracks the same shape across banking and utility-bill payments — 96% of Indian internet users access the internet through mobile devices — and across education, telemedicine, and emergency services. The methodology is the field-research interview record (the nearly seventy interviews) paired with a quantitative shutdown ledger: the report identifies 127 shutdowns across 18 of India's 28 states between January 2020 and December 2022 and anchors its longest-shutdown case study on the 550-day Jammu and Kashmir mobile 4G blackout imposed after the August 2019 abrogation of Article 370.

The recommendations are addressed to the Indian Union and to state governments and follow from this socio-economic-rights framing rather than from a pure free-speech frame. The report calls on the government to end broad, indiscriminate shutdowns and to ensure that any restriction satisfies the tests of lawfulness, necessity, and proportionality that the Supreme Court already laid down in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India; to revise the 2017 Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules; to publish every suspension order with its justification; and to establish a public national database of suspension orders so that civil society can monitor compliance. The frame is deliberately the same legal frame IFF has carried since Bhasin — that internet access is integral to the Article 19(1)(a) freedom of speech and expression — and the 13 June 2023 press release's lead quotation from Bajoria deliberately turns the government's own "Digital India" branding into the analytical instrument: "In the age of 'Digital India,' where the government has pushed to make internet fundamental to every aspect of life, the authorities instead use internet shutdowns as a default policing measure."

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, "No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food" is the first South Asian publication entry on the slate and the first Publication anchored on the internet-shutdown and algorithmic-public-services analytic — closing the geographic gap that the prior publications had clustered around the United States (Unmasking AI, Bug Bounties for Algorithmic Harms, Comply To Fly?, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, A Hazard to Human Rights, Losing Humanity), the United Kingdom (Participatory Data Stewardship, Not a drop to drink), Continental Europe (Automating Society Report 2020), and Latin America (Decisiones automatizadas en la función pública en América Latina). It is the corpus's first publication co-authored by an Indian grassroots civil-society organisation, and it is the clearest single artefact in the corpus articulating how biometric-authenticated and algorithmically-administered public-service delivery converts an internet shutdown into a denial of constitutional and socio-economic rights — the substantive contribution that the corpus's wider digital-public-infrastructure thread on Aadhaar, UPI, AgriStack, and the NREGA attendance app turns on.

The report exercises the HRW org-as-publisher pattern for the third time on the corpus's publications slate, after Losing Humanity (2012) and A Hazard to Human Rights (2025) — both of which were jointly published with Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic on the autonomous-weapons / military-AI register — and is the first to pair HRW's institutional reach with a national civil-society digital-rights organisation from the Global South rather than with a North-American academic clinic. The pairing is the structural counterpart of HRW's autonomous-weapons publishing line in a different register: where the Docherty-authored IHRC reports anchor an international humanitarian-disarmament treaty effort under HRW's name, the Bajoria-authored IFF joint report anchors a national digital-rights and socio-economic-rights case under the same HRW publishing imprint, with the on-the-ground field-research, interviews, and litigation record supplied through IFF's existing programme lines — Project Panoptic, the KeepUsOnline campaign, IFF's role in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, and the post-Bhasin litigation record on Jammu and Kashmir 4G restoration. The 84-of-187 global-shutdowns finding for 2022 and the 127-of-18-states national figure for 2020–2022 are now the corpus's standing reference statistics on the scale of the Indian shutdown record, and the report is referenced from the Internet Freedom Foundation body as the source of those figures and from Apar Gupta's record as the report he carried publicly on the IFF side during his first term as IFF Executive Director.