In March 2015, the Supreme Court of India in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India upheld Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which empowers the Central Government to block public access to online content. The Court’s approval was not unconditional. It rested on the existence of specific procedural safeguards: written reasons for each blocking order, a hearing before a designated officer, review by an Inter-Departmental Committee (IDC), and access to judicial review. The draft amendments to the released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on 30 March 2026 do not refine that constitutional settlement. They dismantle it. The settlement was this: the executive could restrict speech without prior judicial authorisation, but only on terms that left every order subject to judicial review. The safeguards were the condition of validity, not an accompaniment to it.

Website blocking orders under Section 69A grew roughly a hundredfold in the decade to 2023, according to figures MeitY disclosed under the Right to Information Act. By 2025, that figure had reached 24,000. The shift is qualitative as well as numerical: from targeted, supervised intervention to routine, opaque executive control.

Section 69A carries a tension the Supreme Court never resolved. It permits blocking wherever the Central Government “is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so to do” in the interest of grounds tracking Article 19(2), which permits reasonable restrictions on free speech on a closed list of grounds including the sovereignty and integrity of India, public order, and incitement to an offence. “Necessary” implies proportionality; “expedient” means administratively convenient, a markedly lower bar that Article 19(2) itself does not authorise. A merely expedient restriction cannot be a reasonable one, so “expedient” is either void to that extent or must be read as “necessary”. Shreya Singhal appears to have proceeded on the second reading without adopting it. Its reasoning speaks of necessity throughout, but the judgment nowhere interprets “expedient” or holds that the word must be read down, and a narrowing that never enters the operative holding binds no one. What the Court actually decided was that Section 69A survives because of its procedural safeguards. The provision the nodal officer applies is therefore unchanged, and it still permits blocking on grounds of convenience. That matters more now that those safeguards are being weakened.

Three changes in the March 2026 draft illustrate how. First, proposed Rule 3(4) would make a platform’s immunity under Section 79, which protects platforms from liability for content posted by users, conditional on compliance with MeitY advisories and directions that are not formal Section 69A orders. This contradicts Shreya Singhal, which held that platforms neither must act on informal government pressure nor lose immunity for refusing. Platforms facing the loss of legal protection will remove content rather than resist.

Second, the expansion of the IDC’s mandate is textual and easily missed. Rule 14(2) currently confines the Committee to “complaints or grievances” about Code of Ethics violations; the draft substitutes “matters”, including those referred by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and Rule 14(5) does the same for the Committee’s examination and recommendations. As the Internet Freedom Foundation has observed, this incentive structure produces systematic over-removal, whatever the motive behind any individual decision. This turns the IDC from an independent check into a body activated at ministerial discretion.

Third, the retention provisions in Rules 3(1)(g) and 3(1)(h) would preserve indefinite archives of citizens’ online expression across overlapping statutes. Speech that is known to be stored and retrievable is speech that gets self-censored.

Blocking orders have reached Whether any of these blocks in fact rested on an Article 19(2) ground is unknowable, because Rule 16 of the Information Technology (procedure And Safeguards For Blocking For Access Of Information By Public) Rules, 2009 applies to every blocking request and the action taken on it.

Amnesty International has warned that the amendments also risk violating India’s obligations under international human rights law. Six journalist bodies demanded the draft’s withdrawal at the Press Club of India in April 2026.

The constitutional position established in Shreya Singhal was clear: executive content control is permissible only within procedural limits that make judicial oversight practically possible, not merely theoretically available. A blocking regime whose orders are confidential, whose grounds go undisclosed, and whose liability rules push platforms toward removing speech without legal warrant has already moved outside those limits. The 2026 amendments do not address that problem. They make it permanent.