Orders by the Central government to block websites have grown over a hundredfold between 2013 and 2023, showed a Right to Information reply, reported The Hindu on Tuesday.

Response to the Right to Information application, filed by Bihar-based activist Kanhaiya Kumar, said that the Centre issued 62 such orders in 2013. In 2023 till October, the figure stood at 6,954.

The Central government in 2022 issued 6,775 orders blocking websites under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Under Section 69A of the Act, authorised personnel in the Central government, not below the rank of a joint secretary, can send content removal orders to social media platforms. The provision allows the Centre to issue content-blocking orders to online intermediaries if the content is deemed a threat to national security, sovereignty or public order.

This comes against the backdrop of the Department of Technology in December asking internet service providers to compile internet protocol, or IP, addresses of servers in India to facilitate blocking them quickly.

“Location of web/application servers need to be traced on immediate basis as and when required or in case they are not complying with the laws of the land or they are required to be blocked as per [court orders], etc.,” the department said in a notification on December 20.

The notification said that the authority had observed it is time-consuming to trace the locations of servers, especially if their IP addresses are customer-owned and not allocated by the internet service provider.

The Electronics and Information Technology Ministry had told Parliament in December that the Centre asked social media intermediaries to block at least 36,838 URLs between 2018 and October 2023.

Between 2018 and October this year, the Centre sent 13,660 blocking orders to social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. This was the highest received by any social media intermediary.