Quick read: Thoiba's AdSense earnings vanished with Manipur's internet — here's the recourse
In October 2024, Thoiba opened his AdSense dashboard to find months of earnings flagged as "held — not eligible for payment in this period." He filed a support ticket explaining that Manipur's internet had been suspended under the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules 2017. Then another. Then two more. Not one ticket received a real answer.
📡 Thoiba Laishram, 34, films civic accountability stories and festival coverage in Meitei for 175,000 YouTube subscribers and 60,000 Facebook followers in Imphal. He works with a single cameraman cousin. AdSense was his primary income — ₹38,000–₹52,000/month in stable periods.
🚨 The problem
Manipur's rolling internet shutdowns — 217 cumulative days in 2024–25, each issued as a short-order renewal under the 2017 Rules — collapsed his monetizable impressions each time they hit. Google's system cannot distinguish between an audience that stopped watching and an audience that was switched off by a government order. Both fail the same threshold. Result: ₹4.6 lakh withheld across the affected payment cycles, with no visible restoration path in the dashboard and no AdSense support response that addressed the actual question.
🚀 What changed
A journalist friend in Bangalore — Anjana Das, who covers digital rights across the Northeast — had been reading Thoiba's shutdown logs, which he had been attaching to his YouTube video descriptions since May 2024 as a personal record. She asked if she could share his contact with SFLC.in. He said yes.
The Software Freedom Law Centre reviewed his support ticket IDs, AdSense payout CSVs, and YouTube Analytics data showing the impression collapse during each suspension. Their legal officer explained what Thoiba had not previously understood: the Supreme Court's 2020 ruling in Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India establishes a proportionality standard for internet shutdowns — and documented economic harm to a named creator is exactly the kind of record that makes a proportionality argument concrete before a court.
Two RTIs were filed: one to MHA's CPIO seeking certified copies of all 2024–25 suspension orders and the Rule 2(6) review committee minutes, one to the Manipur Home Department for state-issued orders. SFLC is simultaneously drafting a formal letter to Google India asking it to classify the withholding under an extraordinary-circumstances pathway — citing the notification numbers of the government orders directly.
✅ The recourse — in three moves
- RTI to MHA + Manipur Home — 30-day response window — seeking the orders, the committee minutes, and any proportionality analysis prepared before each shutdown was issued
- Proportionality challenge — Manipur High Court — SFLC preparing a writ petition using the ₹4.6 lakh loss figure as documented harm under the Anuradha Bhasin standard
- AdSense extraordinary-circumstances escalation — a formal letter to Google India, signed by SFLC, citing the suspension orders by number — the first documented attempt to use this pathway for a shutdown-affected creator
🇮🇳 Why this matters beyond Manipur
Every regional-language news creator in a shutdown-prone state faces the same invisibility: the platform cannot tell the difference between an audience that left and an audience that was legally disconnected. Manipur, Jammu and Kashmir, and the districts in Rajasthan and Haryana where exam-season shutdowns are routine all produce the same dashboard result: a red zero that the Terms of Service were not written to explain.
Thoiba's RTI, if it surfaces procedural failures in the review process, becomes a record other creators can reference. The AdSense escalation, if it succeeds, becomes a precedent. Neither is guaranteed. But both require someone to file first.