Government Blocks Five OTT Platforms Over Obscene Content
The children asked why their favorite app stopped working. He didn’t know how to explain.
The order came down from Delhi on a Tuesday, typed in officialese and stamped with authority. By Wednesday morning, five apps had vanished from millions of phones across India—MoodXVIP, Koyal Playpro, Digi Movieplex, Feel, Jugnu. Gone. Like they never existed.
In a cramped flat in Daryaganj, an old man named Ramesh pressed his phone screen repeatedly, refreshing, hoping the Jugnu app would reappear. She didn’t know he watched the old Bollywood classics on it late at night, the ones from the ’60s, the black-and-white films his generation had grown up with. He didn’t care about the other content—the “obscene” stuff the government mentioned. He just wanted his songs, his memories, his connection to a younger self.
Two floors above, a teenager named Kavya discovered her favourite web series had disappeared from Feel. She’d been watching it secretly, episodes downloaded to her phone, the kind of show her mother would never approve of—not because it was obscene, but because it showed girls her age kissing boys and making choices their parents wouldn’t understand. Now the app was just a grey icon on her screen. Unclickable. Dead.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting called it due procedure. Rules against obscenity. Public decency. National interest. The words were clean, administrative, designed to sound reasonable. But there was nothing reasonable about the silence that followed.
In a small office in Noida, a young coder named Vikram watched the news on his lunch break. He’d worked on one of those platforms—not the content, just the backend, the servers, the code that made videos play without buffering. He knew the people who ran it, the producers who made the shows, the actors who dreamed of stardom. Now they were all scrambling, lawyers drafting appeals, investors calculating losses.
His phone buzzed. His mother: “Did you see? One of those apps they blocked—was that yours?” He didn’t know how to answer. It wasn’t his. But it also was, somehow. His lines of code, his late nights, his tiny piece of a machine that the government had just declared unfit for public consumption.
That evening, in millions of homes, families gathered for dinner. No one mentioned the blocked apps. No one talked about obscenity or national interest or Section 69A. They talked about school, about work, about whether to watch the news or a movie on the remaining platforms.
But somewhere, in the spaces between the words, a question lingered: What disappears next? And who decides?