Disconnecting Rights: Internet Shutdowns Proportionality and Human Rights Accountability in India after the Telecommunications Act 2023

Abstract

India’s law of internet shutdowns now rests on section 20 of the Telecommunications Act 2023 and the Telecommunications Temporary Suspension of Services Rules 2024. The new Rules improve the previous regime by requiring publication, clearer reasons, defined geography and duration, a twenty four hour transmission period, and last resort consideration. They retain, however, an executive review structure and a fifteen day ceiling for each order, while leaving the intensity of proportionality review and the evidential burden uncertain. This article argues that the constitutional problem is therefore no longer the absence of a structured test but the risk that proportionality becomes a recital rather than a discipline. It develops an evidence forcing six step test that separates legality, proper purpose, rational connection, necessity, tailoring, and balancing with safeguards. The test allocates to the State the burden of producing order specific evidence and applies to the Jammu and Kashmir mobile data restriction reviewed in Foundation for Media Professionals. The article also reconciles Anuradha Bhasin with Pragya Prasun: digital access is neither an absolute freestanding entitlement nor merely a convenience, but an intrinsic component of Article 21 and a medium through which Articles 14 and 19 are exercised. Comparative decisions from the ECOWAS Court, Indonesia, and the European Court of Human Rights show the importance of distinguishing territorial shutdowns from throttling and platform or content blocking. The article proposes staged review at twenty four, forty eight, and seventy two hours, essential service continuity, publication, and separate compensatory and structural remedies