India ranks behind only Iraq and Sudan in terms of money lost in 2019 due to internet shutdowns, according to a report published on Tuesday. The report also found that in terms of the number of hours shut down, India again ranked third, behind Myanmar and Chad. This is a direct consequence of the BJP government’s fondness for Internet shutdowns—people in Kashmir have not had Internet access since August 2019, and there have been many long shutdowns in the Northeast, especially during the recent protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In Uttar Pradesh, the government cut off the internet for days during the recent agitation against the CAA, and before that, in the run-up to the Babri Masjid judgement. In Delhi too, in the aftermath of police violence in Jamia, there was an Internet shutdown.

The report, titled The Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns in 2019, was published by Top10VPN, a publication focused on online privacy.

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Samuel Woodhams, Digital Rights Lead at Top10VPN and one of the co-authors of the report, said, “With the growth of the digital economy and rising connectivity rates, the economic impact of internet shutdowns is becoming increasingly severe. We have also seen an increase in the number of internet shutdowns in recent years and, as the case of Kashmir has shown, they are also becoming longer, all of which exacerbate the negative economic impact.”

According to the NY Times, at one point in December, 60 million people in India were cut off from the Internet, and as this new report by Top10VPN shows, that has a direct impact on the economy. According to the Cellular Operators Association of India, shutdowns in India cost phone companies $350,000 (approximately Rs. 2.5 crore) per hour, and the economy even more. This latest report states that India logged 4,196 hours of Internet shutdowns in 2019, leading to a total loss of over $1.3 billion (approximately Rs 9,347 crore).

“Our calculations are based on the well-respected Cost of Shutdown Tool (COST), which uses indicators from the World Bank, ITU, Eurostat and U.S. Census,” a spokesperson for Top10VPN explained. “This tool only provides national-level calculations so to determine values for Indian regional shutdowns, we calculated the affected regions’ economic output as a proportion of GDP and applied that to the tool’s results.”