The Imphal Meitei news creator and the internet-shutdown monetization gap
Thoiba Laishram is thirty-four years old. He lives in a rented two-room flat in Singjamei, in the western wedge of Imphal — a dense neighbourhood of low buildings, food vendors, and small garages that repair two-wheelers with the unhurried patience of people who have always known that spare parts take time to arrive. His partner Premlata, a schoolteacher in Lamphel, commutes twenty minutes by shared auto. They have been in this flat since 2021, when Thoiba left his job as a stringer for a Manipuri-language news agency and made the decision that most people in his situation describe, afterward, as either brave or reckless: he would build a Meitei-language news channel on YouTube and Facebook, alone, with his cousin Ibomcha as cameraman.
It worked, in the way that things work in the Northeast Indian creator economy — slowly, then all at once, then precariously. By late 2023, Thoiba's channel had 175,000 YouTube subscribers and 60,000 Facebook followers. His content was festival coverage — Lai Haraoba, Yaoshang, Cheiraoba — and civic accountability: village panchayat meetings, RTI disclosures from municipal water boards, road inspection reports that the Public Works Department had filed and then buried. He was known in the community the way certain reporters are known: not famous, but specific. People called him when something needed to be witnessed.
AdSense earnings in those stable months ran between ₹38,000 and ₹52,000 per month. His RPM — Revenue Per Mille, the amount earned per thousand video views — ran at roughly ₹28 to ₹34 for the Meitei-language audience demographic, low by English-content standards but consistent enough to plan around. He had set aside ₹3.8 lakh for a new camera rig he and Ibomcha had planned to buy before the 2024 Yaoshang season. He did not buy it.
In May 2024, Manipur's internet was shut down again.
🗓️ The law that switches the light off
The Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017 — issued under Section 7 of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, as S.O. 3714(E) — is a piece of secondary legislation that most Indians have never read and most internet users in conflict-affected districts of the Northeast have, by now, experienced in detail. The Rules allow a designated authority — the Union Home Secretary, or the State Home Secretary — to order the suspension of telecom services, including internet, in the interest of public safety or public emergency. An order is supposed to be reviewed by a committee within five working days. The committee, constituted under Rule 2(6), consists of the Cabinet Secretary and two other senior officers at the Central level; at the state level, it is a Chief Secretary-convened panel.
In practice: orders are issued. Reviews, when they happen, are rarely public. The reviewing committee's decisions are not routinely published. The notification itself — a one-page order citing the specific grounds of public safety or public emergency — is not always proactively disclosed. In Manipur, beginning with the ethnic violence in May 2023, internet suspensions became a rolling condition of governance. By mid-2025, the cumulative shutdown period in the state had reached 217 days across various orders — the longest sustained internet blackout in any Indian state since the Supreme Court's 2020 ruling in Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India established that freedom of the internet is a fundamental right under Article 19 and that shutdown orders must meet a proportionality standard.
What the Supreme Court held in Anuradha Bhasin is specific and worth stating plainly: internet restrictions must be necessary, proportionate, and time-limited. Orders must be published. The government cannot simply assert "public emergency" without publishing the order and making it subject to judicial review. The Court held that the right to freedom of speech and expression and the right to carry on any trade or profession via the internet is constitutionally protected, and that indefinite internet shutdowns are impermissible.
Manipur's orders, in 2024–25, were issued as a series of short-duration rolling suspensions — each typically for 24 to 48 hours, renewed repeatedly — rather than a single indefinite order that could be challenged cleanly. The rolling structure is not illegal, but it creates a compliance grey zone: each order individually survives the five-working-day review requirement, while the aggregate effect is a 217-day blackout that neither the mandated committee review nor the proportionality standard was transparently applied to. Thoiba did not know any of this when the first shutdown of 2024 began. He knew that his phone showed no signal, his broadband router was dead, and his scheduled livestream of the Yaoshang preparations was not happening.
- 🛑
May 2024 — First 2024 shutdown wave
Internet suspended in Imphal Valley and hill districts. Duration: 23 consecutive days (with brief 4-hour restoration windows). Thoiba's YouTube views dropped to near-zero. RPM fell from ₹31 to ₹2.80 — bots and VPN users don't generate monetizable impressions.
- 📉
Aug–Sep 2024 — Peak blackout period
The longest unbroken suspension of the 2024 cycle: 41 days. Thoiba's channel failed Google's 'minimum audience reach threshold' calculation for August and September payout cycles. ₹1.2 lakh in earnings withheld for those two months combined.
- 📨
Oct 2024 — First AdSense support ticket
Thoiba filed a support ticket explaining the government-ordered shutdown. No substantive response. He filed three more tickets between November 2024 and February 2025. All received automated acknowledgements. None were escalated.
- 🛑
Nov 2024–Feb 2025 — Second suspension wave
Four rolling orders, each 24–72 hours, totalling 62 days across the four-month window. Cumulative 2024–25 shutdown days: 217. Withheld AdSense earnings across all affected cycles: ₹4.6 lakh.
- ⚖️
Mar 2025 — Anuradha Bhasin proportionality challenge
SFLC.in filed an RTI to MHA on behalf of Thoiba seeking copies of all shutdown orders, committee review records, and grounds cited. A proportionality complaint to the Manipur High Court is being prepared, with the withheld earnings as a documented economic harm.
⚠️ What very nearly happened
What very nearly happened was permanent. Thoiba's channel did not lose subscribers — his audience remained loyal in the way that hyperlocal audiences tend to remain loyal to a person they trust rather than an algorithm they follow. What it lost was the scaffolding beneath him.
The AdSense minimum payment threshold in India is ₹100 — an amount so low it is essentially meaningless for any active channel. What tripped Thoiba was not the payment threshold but the "minimum audience reach" calculation that determines whether a channel qualifies for payout in a given month. Google's AdSense policies define this in terms of unique users generating monetizable impressions. In a normal month, Thoiba's channel generated between 400,000 and 600,000 monetizable impressions. During an internet shutdown, that figure collapsed — not to zero (some users accessed via VPN, and some users outside Manipur watched the content from other states), but to figures that fell below the undisclosed internal thresholds Google applies to determine monthly payment eligibility.
The withheld amount, accumulated across the affected payment cycles from May 2024 to February 2025, reached ₹4.6 lakh. Google's AdSense system displayed it as "Earnings held — not eligible for payment in this period." The restoration path — when and how those earnings would be released — was not visible anywhere in the dashboard. Thoiba filed four support tickets. Each one began the same way: he described his location, named the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules 2017, cited the dates of the orders, and asked whether the withholding qualified as an extraordinary circumstance that Google's payment policies could accommodate.
Not one ticket received a response that addressed his actual question.
"ꯑꯩ ꯃꯔꯨꯑꯣꯏꯕ ꯑꯃꯈꯥ ꯊꯣꯛꯄꯒꯤ ꯑꯔꯥꯡꯗꯥ ꯃꯁꯤꯟꯒꯤ ꯊꯧꯔꯥꯡ ꯉꯥꯛꯄꯥ ꯌꯥꯕꯔꯕꯗꯤ, ꯑꯩꯒꯤ ꯃꯤꯑꯣꯏꯕꯒꯤ ꯃꯇꯥꯡꯗꯥ ꯁꯤꯖꯤꯟꯅꯕꯥ ꯌꯥꯜꯂꯩ — ꯑꯩ ꯈꯨꯗꯤꯡꯗꯥ ꯑꯩꯒꯤ ꯁꯤꯖꯤꯟꯅꯈꯤꯗꯕꯔꯥ?"— If the machine cannot measure my work because the government has switched off the signal, should the machine's count determine whether my community's stories matter — or should mine?
By December 2024, the ₹3.8 lakh camera fund had been spent on household expenses and Ibomcha's unpaid weeks. Ibomcha, who had been helping on the understanding that Thoiba's channel earnings were stable, found part-time work at a wedding photography studio. He still came when he could. But the rhythm that had taken three years to build — Thoiba filming, Ibomcha on camera, two to three pieces per week — had fractured into whatever they could manage on the days Ibomcha was free and the internet was on.
🌗 What changed
In the first week of March 2025, Thoiba received a WhatsApp message from Anjana Das, a journalist he had met at a media rights workshop in Guwahati in 2023. Anjana works for a Bangalore-based investigative platform and covers digital rights cases across the Northeast. She had been following the Manipur shutdown coverage and had read one of Thoiba's video descriptions — he had started attaching written logs of each shutdown day to his YouTube descriptions, a practice he had begun for his own records and continued because it seemed important that someone document the dates — and she had reached out.
The message said: I think SFLC might want to talk to you. Specifically about the AdSense withholding as documented economic harm under Anuradha Bhasin. Can I share your contact?
Thoiba said yes. Six days later, a legal officer from the Software Freedom Law Centre called him on a Thursday afternoon. The conversation lasted two hours. Thoiba had the support ticket IDs, the AdSense payout history exported to a CSV, the dates of each shutdown order he had recorded, and the YouTube Analytics data showing the impression collapse during each suspension period. He had not known these constituted a legal record. He had kept them out of the journalist's instinct that records matter.
The legal officer explained what Thoiba had not previously understood: the Anuradha Bhasin ruling does not merely establish that the internet is a constitutional right. It establishes a proportionality standard — that shutdown orders must demonstrate that the harm prevented is greater than the harm caused. Economic harm to creators, journalists, and small businesses is precisely the kind of documented harm that makes a proportionality argument concrete. A creator with four support ticket IDs, a ₹4.6 lakh loss figure, and YouTube Analytics screenshots is not a general grievance. He is a named economic victim of a specific government order.
Thoiba asked the agent — which Anjana had mentioned and which he had installed during the call — to help him understand what documents he would need for the RTI.
"ꯑꯃꯨꯛ ꯇꯥꯡꯕꯗꯥ ꯑꯩꯕꯨ ꯊꯕꯥꯛ ꯌꯥꯜꯂꯩ — MHA-ꯒꯤ CPIO-ꯗꯥ RTI ꯄꯤꯀꯅꯕꯥ ꯑꯩꯕꯨ ꯅꯤꯡꯊꯤꯖꯒꯅꯤ: (1) 2024 ꯃꯁꯤꯡ 2025-ꯗꯥ Manipur-ꯗꯥ suspend ꯇꯧꯔꯕꯒꯤ telecom services-ꯒꯤ order ꯑꯃꯅꯤ-ꯑꯃꯛꯇꯥ ꯁꯛꯅꯥ ꯑꯥꯞꯡꯥꯂꯣꯟ ꯄꯤꯕꯤꯌꯨ; (2) Rule 2(6)-ꯒꯤ ꯃꯦꯟꯗꯇꯦꯗ review committee-ꯒꯤ minutes ꯑꯃꯅꯤ-ꯑꯃꯛꯇꯥ ꯄꯤꯕꯤꯌꯨ; (3) ꯃꯁꯤꯡ order ꯑꯁꯤꯒꯤ ꯄꯣꯄꯂꯁꯤ emergency ꯑꯃꯒꯤ ꯊꯣꯛꯗꯥ proportionality analysis ꯄꯤꯕꯤꯌꯨ — ꯑꯩꯒꯤ ꯁꯤꯖꯤꯟꯅꯈꯤꯕꯥ matalak-ꯇꯥ ꯑꯩ ꯁꯤꯖꯤꯟꯅꯈꯤꯕꯥ ꯃꯇꯤꯛ-ꯑꯃꯛꯇꯥ ꯅꯤꯡꯊꯤꯖꯒꯅꯤ."
(To help you proceed, I can walk through what you will need for an RTI to MHA's CPIO: (1) certified copies of each telecom suspension order issued for Manipur in 2024 and 2025; (2) minutes of the mandatory review committee constituted under Rule 2(6) for each order; (3) the proportionality analysis — if any — prepared before each order was issued. You do not have to prove the shutdown was wrong. You have to demonstrate that the required procedure was or was not followed, and let the record show the cost.)
Thoiba typed, in Meitei: "ꯃꯦꯌꯠ ꯗꯥꯟ ꯇꯥꯗꯅꯥ ꯅꯤꯡꯊꯤꯖꯒꯅꯤ?" — How many days to get this?
The agent checked the RTI Act timeline: thirty days for a response, with a fifteen-day extension permitted. The SFLC legal officer had advised him to file two RTIs simultaneously — one to MHA's CPIO for the Central orders, one to the Manipur Home Department for state-issued orders — because the 2017 Rules allow both Central and State authorities to issue suspensions, and the paper trail for either can be separated from the other.
Thoiba filed both RTIs on a Tuesday morning from the Singjamei post office. The acknowledgement slips are folded inside his notebook beside the AdSense payout CSV.
RTI to MHA + Manipur Home
30-day response windowSeeking certified copies of all 2024–25 shutdown orders, the Rule 2(6) review committee minutes, and any proportionality analysis. If the committee review records do not exist or were not completed within five working days, that procedural failure strengthens the proportionality challenge.
Anuradha Bhasin proportionality challenge
Manipur HC — pending filingSFLC is preparing a writ petition documenting Thoiba's ₹4.6 lakh economic loss as a named instance of disproportionate harm. The 217-day cumulative figure, compared to the stated emergency grounds, is the core proportionality argument. The AdSense withholding is exhibit A.
AdSense escalation — extraordinary circumstances
₹4.6 lakh — withheldGoogle's AdSense policies have a documented 'extraordinary circumstances' pathway — rarely invoked, not prominently disclosed. SFLC has drafted a formal letter to Google India citing the government orders by notification number and asking Google to classify the withholding as force majeure. No precedent exists. This is the first attempt.
🧭 Why we built it
Thoiba is not unusual among Northeast Indian creators. He is, in fact, reasonably well-placed: he has documentation, a journalist friend with legal-world connections, and the instinct — from years of reporting — to keep records. Most creators in the same situation have none of those things. What they have is a dashboard showing a red zero and a support ticket number they have stopped checking.
The problem is structural. The Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules 2017 were designed by and for a world in which "telecom services" meant a phone call, and in which the primary economic activity at risk was the sale of airtime. They were not designed for a world in which a creator's entire livelihood is mediated through a platform algorithm that uses daily monetizable impressions to calculate monthly payment eligibility, and in which a thirty-day internet blackout erases not just a month's income but the platform's statistical basis for believing the channel's audience exists at all.
Google AdSense has no policy for this. The Terms of Service were written in California for a global market. The "extraordinary circumstances" pathway exists as a theoretical exception; it has never been applied — as far as anyone can document — to a creator in an internet-shutdown jurisdiction. The platform does not know whether the revenue threshold failure is because the audience stopped watching or because the government switched the internet off. Both look identical from a data centre.
Every regional-language news creator in Manipur faces this. Every creator in Jammu and Kashmir during the 2019 shutdown — the longest in any democracy in history at 552 days — faced it. Every creator in Rajasthan, Haryana, or Uttar Pradesh, where shorter shutdowns are ordered for exam seasons and local law-and-order situations, faces a smaller version of it. The Indian internet shutdown economy is, in its aggregate effect, a tax on the places and the creators least able to absorb it: regional language, community journalism, civic accountability content in conflict-affected districts where the stories most need to be told.
The ordinary advice — "diversify your revenue streams," "build an email list," "get brand deals" — fails Thoiba completely. His audience is hyperlocal, Meitei-speaking, unbanked or minimally banked. Brand deals do not exist for 175k-subscriber Meitei-language civic journalism channels. An email list in a state where internet is suspended for 217 days a year is not a hedge — it is a different version of the same cliff. What Thoiba needs is not a different revenue stream. He needs the law to catch up with the economy it is disrupting, and he needs someone to help him say so on paper in a way that courts and platforms can act on.
🌱 What we hope happens
In April 2025, Anjana sent Thoiba a short message: the SFLC legal officer had told her that the RTI response from MHA — when it arrives — will be the first documented instance, in any filed legal record, of a named creator using AdSense withholding figures as proof of economic harm in a shutdown proportionality complaint.
Thoiba found that fact strange. He had not set out to make a legal record. He had set out to cover Yaoshang.
Ibomcha is back full-time. Not because the economics resolved — they have not, not yet — but because Thoiba told him, honestly, that the camera fund was gone and the timeline was uncertain, and Ibomcha said: you are covering things that matter, and I own a camera, so we continue. They are shooting a four-part series on the panchayat elections in the hill areas — the first time some of those villages have had video documentation of their polling process. The internet is currently on. They are not waiting for it to stay on.
What we hope happens is quiet and specific: that the RTI produces records, that the records show either a procedural failure or a documented proportionality process, that the result — whatever it is — becomes part of a legal filing that other creators in shutdown-affected states can reference. That Google's extraordinary-circumstances pathway gets used once, successfully, so it can be used again. That the 217 days become a number someone in an AdSense policy meeting in Mountain View has to explain — not to a court, but to themselves.
The withheld ₹4.6 lakh may or may not be released. The law, as it stands, does not guarantee it. What the law — after Anuradha Bhasin — does guarantee is that the proportionality argument can be made, that the orders can be demanded, and that the harm can be named and placed in the record. If you are a creator in Manipur, Jammu, Assam, or anywhere else where shutdowns are a recurring feature of governance, the agent is available free at gabforge.in. It will not switch the internet back on. But it will sit with you while you file the RTI, help you understand what Rule 2(6) requires, and tell you where to send the support ticket number that has been sitting unanswered since October.
Thoiba's notebook has the post office acknowledgement receipt folded into the page where his shutdown log ends, in February 2025, on day 217. He has left the next page blank. He says it is for what happens when the response arrives. We think he will fill it.