the test of shame has never stayed the same;

what once was whispered now streams and stays —

the law still learns to name the changing gaze.

— Ashi Jamal

Regulating the Unregulated:
An Analysis of OTT Platforms and Obscenity Laws in the Digital
Streaming Era: An Indian Context
A Doctrinal and Comparative Legal Study of India’s OTT Obscenity Framework Benchmarked Against Global Regulatory Models with an Assessment of OTT’s Impact on Children in India

Ashi Jamal
Programme: LL.M. (Human Rights)
University: M.J.P. Rohilkhand University, Bareilly

Abstract

This paper explores the growing conflict between creative freedom, public morality, and child safety on OTT streaming platforms in India. It examines how Indian laws on obscenity have changed over time—moving from strict colonial-era rules to a more flexible “community standards” test established in the Aveek Sarkar (2014) case. The paper evaluates how the government now regulates digital content through the IT Rules 2021. It highlights a major human rights concern: the current three-tier complaint system is controlled mostly by government officials rather than independent courts. By looking at recent events from 2025–2026, such as the legal dispute involving influencer Ranveer Allahbadia and various state-level platform bans, the paper argues that India is shifting toward an aggressive style of digital governance. The frequent use of sudden government blocking orders, instead of formal court trials, creates a “chilling effect” that scares content creators and restricts free speech.

Beyond legal issues, the paper also looks at how daily OTT watching affects children’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Using recent Indian research, it shows that active parental guidance and healthy viewing habits at home protect children much better than simply cutting down their screen time. Finally, the paper suggests practical solutions: creating an independent body to handle content appeals to protect free speech, and helping families manage digital media at home in a realistic, rights-respecting way.

Keywords: OTT platforms, obscenity, IT Rules 2021, Aveek Sarkar, community standards test, human rights, freedom of expression, digital media regulation, children and screen time, parental supervision, chilling effect

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Research Problem, Objectives, and Questions

3. Literature Review

4. Research Methodology

5. Chronological Evolution of Obscenity Jurisprudence in India: A Brief History

6. Understanding Obscenity: Legal Tests and Their Evolution

7. The Regulatory Framework for OTT Platforms in India

8. Judicial Responses and Key Controversies

9. Latest Case Law (2025-2026)

10. Impact of OTT Platforms on Children in India

11. Comparative Perspectives

12. Discussion: Tensions Between Free Expression and Regulation

13. Findings

14. Combined Recommendations

15. Conclusion

References

5.1 Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (1965)

5.2 Bobby Art International v. Om Pal Singh Hoon (1996)

5.3 Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal (2014)

5.4 Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015)

5.5 Aparna Purohit v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2021)

5.6 Apoorva Arora v. State (Govt. of NCT of Delhi) (2024)

5.7 Ranveer Allahbadia v. Union of India (2025–2026)

5.8 Uday Mahurkar & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors. (2025–2026)

1. Introduction

In the last few years, OTT platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ Hotstar have become a big part of how people in India watch movies and shows. Before these platforms came along, content had rules to follow. Films had to be certified by the Central Board of Film Certification before release, and TV channels had to follow the Programme Code under the Cable Television Networks Act, 1995. But OTT platforms did not have any such rule for a long time, and they could release content directly to viewers without anyone checking it first. This was actually seen as a good thing at the start, because it gave creators more freedom to make bolder content. But soon this freedom also became a problem, since many shows started getting called obscene, vulgar, or offensive to religious sentiments, and this led to a lot of controversy.

Now the problem is that the word “obscenity” itself is not really easy to define. Indian law has never given a complete definition of it. Instead, over the years, the courts have made their own tests to decide when something crosses the line from being just artistic or bold into something that can actually be restricted by law. The first test used was the Hicklin test, which came from the colonial period, and the second one is the community standards test, which is used today. But when we try to apply these tests to something like OTT platforms, it gets complicated, because OTT content is different from a movie in a theatre. It can be watched alone, on a phone, anywhere, anytime, and this makes it harder to regulate. This exact problem, of applying old legal tests to new-age streaming platforms, is what this paper is trying to look into.

2. Research Problem, Objectives, and Questions

This paper is organised around the following objectives:

• To trace the legal evolution of the concept of obscenity in India.
• To examine the regulatory framework governing OTT content, particularly the IT Rules, 2021.
• To assess how this framework has been enforced in practice, including recent platform bans.
• To evaluate the adequacy of current regulation in balancing free expression with legitimate concerns about obscene content.
• To propose recommendations for a clearer regulatory approach.
• To assess the impact of OTT consumption on children’s physical health, cognition, and psychological and social wellbeing, and the moderating role of parental supervision.

Research Questions:

• What legal standards currently govern the determination of obscenity in India, and how well do they translate to OTT content?
• How does the IT Rules, 2021 framework regulate OTT platforms, and what are its structural limitations?
• Does the current model adequately balance Article 19(1)(a) free-speech protections against societal and child-safety concerns?
• What does India-specific evidence show about the physical, cognitive, and psychological effects of OTT consumption on children, and what role does parental supervision play in moderating these effects?

3. Literature Review

Writing on this subject can be grouped into roughly three strands. The first looks at the legal history of obscenity law, tracing how the Hicklin test, drawn from the English case Regina v. Hicklin (1868) and adopted by the Indian Supreme Court in Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (1965), eventually gave way to the community standards test set out in Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal (2014). This body of writing shows that Indian courts have slowly, though not completely, moved away from Victorian-era ideas of morality towards a more contextual approach that pays attention to actual harm.

The second strand looks specifically at the regulatory structure built for digital media, mainly the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Most commentators accept that these Rules filled a real gap in the law, but they also flag some constitutional concerns: the three-tier grievance system is led mostly by the executive, the content categories it uses are somewhat vague, and there is no independent, court-like body overseeing it the way there is for film certification.

The third strand is more critical in tone. It asks whether “community standards” can even work fairly in a society as plural and digitally fragmented as India’s, and whether obscenity regulation ends up bearing down harder on marginalised voices, women telling their own stories, or unconventional filmmaking. Put together, this literature suggests that even though the legal test for obscenity has become more liberal over the years, the machinery used to actually apply that test to OTT content is still unsettled, and in many ways still being argued over.

4. Research Methodology

This paper follows a doctrinal legal research method. It relies mainly on primary sources, statutes, rules, and case law, along with secondary sources such as academic commentary, government statements, and reliable news reporting on recent enforcement action. The approach here is qualitative and analytical rather than empirical: the aim is to map out the legal framework and judge how coherent and adequate it is, not to survey what viewers actually think. For very recent developments, such as the platform bans of 2025-26, the paper has had to rely on publicly available government statements and news coverage, since enforcement in this space is still evolving and official records are not always easy to access.

5. Chronological Evolution of Obscenity Jurisprudence in India: A Brief History

Before looking at the legal tests in detail in the next section, it is useful to first go through the important court cases in order, from the earliest one to the most recent. These cases show how the courts’ thinking on obscenity has changed over the years, from print media to today’s OTT platforms. The following cases are as follows:

5.1 Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (1965) — The Era of Strict Censorship

Facts and Context:

This case involved D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, copies of which had been seized by the state on the ground that selling the book amounted to public obscenity under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code.

Judicial Principle:

The Supreme Court adopted the nineteenth-century British “Hicklin Test” for this case. Under this test, a court could pick out a single passage, or even a few words, look at it completely out of context, and if that fragment seemed capable of “depraving or corrupting” a susceptible mind, declare the entire work obscene. This was a very restrictive way of judging creative work, since it left almost no room for context.

5.2 Bobby Art International v. Om Pal Singh Hoon (1996) — Introduction of the Contextual Test

Facts and Context:

This case concerned the film Bandit Queen, a biographical drama about Phoolan Devi’s life, which was challenged in court over its explicit language, violent scenes, and a moment of frontal nudity.

Judicial Principle:

Here the Court moved away from judging isolated fragments and said instead that a work has to be looked at as a whole. Since the nudity in Bandit Queen was meant to shock the viewer and build empathy for what the character had suffered, not to titillate, the Court held that the film was not obscene. This was one of the earlier signs that artistic intention and narrative context would matter to how obscenity is judged.

5.3 Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal (2014) — The Community Standards Benchmark

Facts and Context:

A German magazine had originally published a photograph of tennis player Boris Becker with his fiancée, taken as a protest against racism. When an Indian sports journal reprinted the same photograph, it was challenged as obscene.

Judicial Principle:

This is the case where the Supreme Court finally set aside the Hicklin Test and adopted the “contemporary community standards” test instead. Under this newer test, something counts as obscene only if a reasonable person today, looking at the work as a whole and in its proper context, would find that it is mainly meant to appeal to prurient or voyeuristic interest.

5.4 Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) — Establishing Digital Safeguards

Facts and Context:

This was a public interest case challenging parts of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which gave the police very wide powers to arrest people simply for posting content online that someone found offensive.

Judicial Principle:

The Supreme Court struck down Section 66A for being far too vague, but it kept Section 69A in place, confirming that the government does have the power to block online content in the interest of public order and morality, provided it follows certain procedural safeguards. Section 69A is still the main tool the government uses today to take down explicit digital content.

5.5 Aparna Purohit v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2021) — The Trigger for Streaming Regulation

Facts and Context:

Several FIRs were filed against the creators of the web series Tandav and against Amazon Prime Video’s India content head, on the allegation that the show hurt religious sentiments.

Judicial Principle:

While hearing the anticipatory bail plea of the content head, the Supreme Court remarked that digital platforms were functioning without enough institutional accountability, and that the industry’s own self-regulation was not doing the job. Most commentators treat this observation as the real trigger that pushed the government towards notifying the Information Technology Rules, 2021, along with its three-tier grievance mechanism.

5.6 Apoorva Arora v. State (Govt. of NCT of Delhi) (2024) — Objective Standards for Digital Dialogue

Facts and Context:

This case involved criminal proceedings against the creators of the web series College Romance, over an episode whose dialogue relied heavily on profanity and vulgar language.

Judicial Principle:

The Supreme Court quashed the FIR, holding that vulgar or crude language by itself does not make something obscene. Applying the community standards test, the Court made clear that content only becomes obscene where it is shown to excite lustful or sexually provocative thoughts, not simply because it offends polite notions of speech. This distinction matters, because it keeps “distasteful” and “obscene” from being treated as the same thing.

5.7 Ranveer Allahbadia v. Union of India (2025–2026) — Expanding Regulation to User-Generated Content

Facts and Context:

Explicit remarks made during an episode of the independent YouTube talk show India’s Got Latent led to several overlapping FIRs being filed across different states, which is what pushed the creators to approach the Supreme Court under Article 32 for protection from arrest.

Judicial Principle:

As the case went on, the Supreme Court used it as an opportunity to question why open video-sharing platforms have no age-gating or content-verification systems, noting that a simple one-line disclaimer on screen is not enough to protect minors. The matter was finally closed in September 2026, after the creators complied with the Court’s directions, which included public apologies and social-responsibility initiatives. This case remains important because it extended obscenity scrutiny beyond curated OTT platforms into ordinary, user-generated digital content.

5.8 Uday Mahurkar & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors. (SC PIL, 2025–2026) — The Push for Structural Re-Drafting

Facts and Context:

This public interest case asked for a permanent, centralised statutory body to oversee digital streaming content, similar to the Central Board of Film Certification that already exists for cinema.

Judicial Principle:

The Supreme Court issued notices to several major platforms and technology companies, but repeated that deciding how digital-media regulation should be structured is really a job for the legislature and the executive, not something courts should be designing themselves through judicial policy-making. In response, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting told the Court that it was preparing amendments that would define online obscenity more precisely and extend television-style programming codes to digital platforms.

6. Understanding Obscenity: Legal Tests and Their Evolution

6.1 The Hicklin Test

The starting point for Indian obscenity law is an English case, Regina v. Hicklin (1868), which held that material is obscene if it tends to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” The Indian Supreme Court picked up this test in Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra (1965), upholding the conviction of a Bombay bookseller who had stocked D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. Under the Hicklin test, a work could be judged obscene purely on the basis of isolated passages, looked at through the eyes of the most susceptible reader, without any regard for the work’s overall literary or artistic value. Over time this made the test very hard to reconcile with the free speech guarantee under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.

6.2 The Community Standards Test

Nearly fifty years later, the Supreme Court finally broke away from the Hicklin test in Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal (2014). The case arose from the Indian republication of a German magazine photograph showing tennis player Boris Becker posing nude with his fiancée, as a statement against apartheid and racism. The Court held that nudity or sexual content is not obscene simply because it exists; the work has to be judged as a whole, in context, and from the perspective of an average, reasonable member of contemporary society rather than the most easily influenced person. This “community standards” approach, borrowed partly from the American case Roth v. United States (1957), gives creators more room for artistic and socially meaningful expression. At the same time, it brings its own uncertainty, since “community standards” are nowhere defined in statute, vary widely across a country as diverse as India, and leave a fair amount of discretion to individual judges, police officers, and now content moderators and government officials reviewing OTT content.

7. The Regulatory Framework for OTT Platforms in India

7.1 The Pre-2021 Regulatory Vacuum

Before 2021, OTT platforms functioned largely outside any dedicated statutory regulation. Films are certified under the Cinematograph Act, 1952 before they can be shown in theatres, and television has to follow the Programme Code under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995. The Karnataka High Court clarified that films streamed over the internet did not fall within the Cinematograph Act at all, leaving a clear gap in the law. In the absence of anything more specific, OTT platforms were governed mainly through general criminal law: Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code on obscenity, the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, and the Information Technology Act, 2000, along with voluntary codes adopted by industry bodies such as the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). These codes turned out to be largely ineffective, mainly because they had no real enforcement mechanism behind them.

7.2 The IT Rules, 2021

The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, issued under the IT Act, 2000, brought OTT platforms, described in the Rules as “publishers of online curated content,” under formal regulatory oversight for the first time. Some of the key features are:

• Content classification into five age-based categories (U, U/A 7+, U/A 13+, U/A 16+, and A), with content descriptors displayed prominently before viewing.
• Mandatory parental controls and, for “A”-rated content, access control mechanisms such as age verification.
• A prohibition on ten categories of content, including material that is obscene, defamatory, or a threat to public order or state security.
• A three-tier grievance redressal structure: (i) an in-house grievance officer at the platform level, (ii) self-regulatory bodies formed by industry associations, and (iii) an oversight mechanism led by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), which can escalate complaints and, where warranted, direct blocking of content or platforms.

Unlike film certification, this system has no pre-release screening built into it; it works instead through complaints and monitoring after content has already been published. There have been proposals, such as the draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, to move towards pre-screening through Content Evaluation Committees, but as of mid-2026 this is still under discussion rather than in force, and it has already drawn criticism for potentially bringing back a form of prior restraint that would sit uneasily with Article 19(1)(a).

7.3 Enforcement in Practice: Recent Platform Bans

Enforcement under the IT Rules, 2021 has picked up noticeably through 2025-26. After consultations between the Ministries of Home Affairs, Women and Child Development, and Electronics and IT, the government has ordered the blocking of dozens of OTT platforms and apps for hosting content it considers obscene, vulgar, or pornographic. In one round in 2025, roughly two dozen platforms and their apps were blocked together; further rounds in the following months targeted several smaller regional streaming services as well, with officials relying on Rule 3(1)(b) of the IT Rules, which bars content that is “obscene, pornographic, invasive of privacy, insulting or harassing on the basis of gender, racially or ethnically objectionable, or promoting hate or violence.” Larger, mainstream platforms have not generally faced blocking orders so far, which suggests enforcement has been concentrated on platforms built primarily around explicit or “soft-porn” content rather than mainstream original programming. Officials have also pointed out that platforms failing to meet these obligations lose the safe-harbour protection that intermediaries normally get under Section 79 of the IT Act, which opens them up to direct prosecution.

8. Judicial Responses and Key Controversies

A few controversies show this tension between creative freedom and obscenity concerns quite clearly. The Amazon Prime Video series Tandav (2021) led to several FIRs alleging that it hurt religious sentiments, and the Allahabad High Court denied anticipatory bail to a senior platform executive, which fuelled a wider debate about whether OTT content should be pre-screened at all. Series like Mirzapur and Sacred Games drew similar complaints alleging obscenity or community insult, with courts generally saying that creators still need to exercise due diligence even where there is no formal pre-certification requirement. More broadly, the Supreme Court has said that OTT content cannot be left entirely unregulated, while also cautioning that any regulatory framework has to stay consistent with Article 19(1)(a). The legitimacy of the IT Rules’ three-tier system has itself been challenged in several High Courts, with petitioners arguing that its content standards are vague and that leaving final oversight with the executive, instead of an independent body, risks a chilling effect on legitimate expression.

9. Latest Case Law (2025-2026)

The period between 2025 and 2026 has seen the biggest wave of litigation and enforcement activity around OTT obscenity since the IT Rules were first notified in 2021. The cases discussed below show how courts and the executive are, in real time, working out the boundaries that the community standards test leaves undefined.

9.1 Ranveer Allahbadia v. Union of India (2025–2026)

This case began with an episode of the YouTube panel show India’s Got Latent, aired on 8 February 2025, where panelist Ranveer Allahbadia made sexually explicit remarks about parents that were widely criticised as vulgar. Multiple FIRs followed against Allahbadia and his fellow panelists, including Samay Raina and Ashish Chanchlani, in Maharashtra and Assam, invoking provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 on obscene acts and outraging modesty, along with the Cinematograph Act, 1952 and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986. Allahbadia moved the Supreme Court under Article 32 (W.P. (Crl.) 83 of 2025), asking for the FIRs to be quashed or consolidated and seeking protection from arrest. On 18 February 2025, a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh granted interim protection on strict conditions, including surrendering his passport and stopping new episodes, while describing the content in unusually strong language as “disgusting” and “filthy.” By 3 March 2025, recognising that people’s livelihoods depended on the show, the Court allowed production to resume as long as the content stayed “decent,” and asked the Solicitor General to propose a national framework for regulating online content. The case dragged on into 2026: in July that year, the Bench imposed costs of Rs 3 lakh each on Allahbadia, Raina, and Chanchlani over concerns that they had not fully complied with its earlier directions. Eventually, a Bench now led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, closed the matter in September 2026, quashing the connected FIRs and disposing of the writ petitions on the ground that continuing the case would serve no real purpose given the parties’ compliance in the meantime. Notably, the Court chose not to decide the larger question of how far speech on internet platforms can be regulated, leaving that for an appropriate case in the future, while making clear that the executive remains free to act within the law. This case matters for two reasons: it took obscenity scrutiny beyond formal OTT platforms and into podcast-style YouTube content, and it showed the Supreme Court itself acting almost like an interim content regulator, through the conditions it attached to bail-like relief over an eighteen-month period. Some commentators see this as an uncomfortably direct form of judicially imposed prior restraint, one that was eventually wound down without the Court ever ruling on the underlying constitutional question.

9.2 In Re: Obscene Content on OTT and Social Media Platforms (SC PIL, 2025)

Between April and May 2025, the Supreme Court took up a public interest case seeking a ban on sexually explicit content across digital platforms, along with a CBFC-style certification body for online content. A Bench of Justices B.R. Gavai and A.G. Masih issued notice to the Union Government and to major platforms, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Ullu Digital, AltBalaji, and Mubi, as well as social media companies like Google, Meta, and X Corp. The Solicitor General told the Court that the government was actively consid¹ering new regulations but cautioned against an outright ban. Notably, the Court indicated that the job of designing a regulatory solution belonged with the executive and the legislature, not the judiciary, a position that fits with the separation-of-powers concerns raised earlier in this paper, even as it kept pressing the government for a timeline.

9.3 The Ullu ‘House Arrest’ Takedown (2025)

Around the same time, between April and May 2025, a reality-style web show called House Arrest, streamed on the Ullu platform, drew heavy public backlash after clips of sexually explicit content spread widely on social media. The National Commission for Women took suo motu notice and summoned the platform’s CEO along with the show’s host. A criminal complaint led to an FIR against the host, the producer, and others, under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Information Technology Act, and the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, alleging that the show insulted the modesty of women. Ullu pulled the show off its platform soon after the controversy blew up. This episode is a good example of enforcement happening outside the courtroom altogether: public and political pressure, combined with the National Commission for Women stepping in, was enough to get the show taken down well before any court had ruled on whether it was actually obscene.

9.4 Shwetha Menon v. State of Kerala (2026)

In this 2026 matter, the Kerala High Court granted an interim stay on criminal proceedings against actress Shwetha Menon, who was facing an FIR under Section 67A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, for publishing or transmitting sexually explicit material, over her appearance in films and advertisements that were later circulated on social media and adult websites and alleged to be obscene. The complaint had come from an office-bearer of a media association in Kerala. The High Court’s decision to stay the proceedings, pending fuller consideration, shows continuing judicial caution about letting obscenity complaints against performers go straight to trial without first checking whether the community standards threshold is actually met, which echoes the kind of contextual, whole-work analysis that Aveek Sarkar requires.

9.5 Government Blocking Orders as De Facto Adjudication (2025-2026)

Outside of formal litigation, this period also saw a steady stream of executive blocking orders, which in practice have become the main way obscenity disputes involving OTT platforms actually get resolved. In July 2025, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting ordered the blocking of 25 OTT platforms and apps, including ALTBalaji (ALTT), Ullu, Big Shots App, and Desiflix, citing the Thirteenth Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology, which had criticised the spread of adult content that was bypassing existing safeguards. The order relied on Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000, whose constitutional validity was upheld in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), read together with Rule 3(1)(b) of the IT Rules, 2021. Further rounds followed in late 2025 and February 2026, when platforms such as MoodXVIP, Jugnu, Koyal PlayPro, Digi MoviePlex, and Feel were blocked on similar grounds. Legal commentators point out that affected platforms can still challenge these blocking orders before the High Courts under Article 226, or before the Supreme Court under Article 32, but as of mid-2026 very few such challenges appear to have succeeded. This leaves executive blocking, rather than adversarial litigation, as the dominant, if constitutionally questionable, way OTT obscenity disputes actually get resolved in practice.

10. Impact of OTT Platforms on Children in India

Alongside this question of obscenity regulation, India’s fast-growing OTT market raises a related but quite different issue: how everyday streaming affects children’s health, thinking, emotional wellbeing, and behaviour. Today’s children are growing up as “digital natives,” for whom a streaming device is often as familiar as a television set once was for their parents. Unlike broadcast television, OTT platforms offer content libraries that are on-demand, algorithm-driven, and designed to encourage binge-watching, available continuously and often privately on personal or shared mobile devices rather than a shared living-room screen. This shift, towards viewing that is private, continuous, and shaped by algorithms, changes not just what children watch but also how much they watch, how often, and how independently.

10.1 Physical Health Effects

One survey of parents of children in grades 1 to 8 in South India found that more than half of them reported a negative effect on their child’s eyesight linked to screen exposure, along with hearing and balance complaints such as ear pain, tinnitus, and dizziness in a fair number of children. The same survey also recorded general body discomfort, neck pain and stiffness, and headaches as common complaints tied to long hours of screen exposure.

Another study, a cross-sectional one looking at Indian adolescents during the pandemic, found that excessive screen time was linked to disrupted sleep and unhealthy eating habits, and noted that more than two-thirds of urban Indian adolescents were already crossing two hours of daily screen time even before the pandemic pushed this further. Since OTT viewing often happens late at night and in bed, it seems to be a recurring contributor to delayed sleep onset and shorter sleep overall in these studies.

10.2 Cognitive and Academic Effects

The same South Indian survey found that a large share of parents noticed a drop in their children’s concentration, which they linked to screen exposure, along with wider changes in health and behaviour. Excessive, unstructured viewing, especially binge-watching, which OTT platforms actively encourage through autoplay and serialised storytelling, has been connected in Indian youth studies from Mumbai and Navi Mumbai to poor time management, with academic performance being one of the areas that suffers as viewing time goes up.

This fits a wider pattern seen across the research: it isn’t screen exposure by itself that causes problems, but unstructured, frequent, poorly supervised viewing that is most strongly linked to attention and academic difficulties. In other words, how children watch OTT content seems to matter just as much as how much they watch.

10.3 Psychological and Emotional Effects

Indian studies on youth OTT and web-series viewing keep finding links to anxiety, low mood, and insomnia. One study on Indian youth found that watching content involving substance use, aggression, abuse, or sexual material was linked to participants reporting feelings of insecurity, despair, and insomnia on a near-daily basis. A comparable South Asian survey comparing supervised and unsupervised screen use found noticeably higher rates of self-reported mental health concerns among children in the unsupervised group, along with higher rates of emotional, behavioural, and peer-relationship difficulties. This broadly matches the direction of the Indian findings, even though it comes from a comparable rather than an India-specific sample, as summarised in Table 1 below.

Outcome Measured	Unsupervised Screen Use	Supervised Screen Use
Any mental health concern	56.2%	43.8%
Behavioural difficulties	28.3%	Lower
Peer relationship difficulties	28.8%	Lower
Emotional difficulties	15.7%	Lower

Table 1: Reported mental-health and behavioural outcomes by parental supervision status among children with regular digital screen use, from a comparable South Asian cross-sectional study cited alongside Indian survey findings.

10.4 Social and Behavioural Effects

Indian research on youth OTT use has also flagged behavioural and relationship effects, including strained relationships with friends and family as viewing time goes up. One study looking specifically at juvenile behaviour in India found a possible link between heavy, unsupervised OTT and internet use and exposure to content that normalises risky or antisocial behaviour among adolescents. The researchers behind this study are careful to point out that correlation in survey-based youth research does not prove that OTT content directly causes criminal or behavioural problems, but they argue that unsupervised exposure to content that glamorises aggression, substance use, or rule-breaking could be one contributing factor among several in how adolescents develop behaviourally.

10.5 The Protective Role of Parental Supervision

Across all the studies looked at here, the one factor that comes up again and again as making a real difference is parental supervision and mediation of screen use, not simply whether a household has an OTT subscription or not. Children in households where viewing is supervised consistently show lower rates of mental-health and behavioural problems compared to children with similar access but no supervision. This suggests that policies and parenting approaches focused on structuring how and when children use OTT platforms, rather than blanket restrictions alone, are likely to work better than access-focused measures on their own, a point returned to in the Combined Recommendations below.

10.6 Limitations of the Child-Impact Research

• Most Indian studies in this area are cross-sectional and survey-based, relying on parental proxy-report or self-report by young people, limiting causal inference.
• Sample sizes in India-specific OTT studies are often small and regionally concentrated (e.g., Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, South India), limiting national generalisability.
• Much available data conflates general screen time (education, social media, gaming) with OTT/streaming-specific viewing, making it difficult to isolate OTT’s distinct contribution.
• Longitudinal Indian data tracking the same children over years of OTT exposure is largely absent, leaving long-term developmental effects under-studied.

11. Comparative Perspectives

How countries regulate streaming content differs quite a bit depending on their constitutional traditions, media history, and general appetite for state intervention. Looking at India’s IT Rules, 2021 alongside the systems used in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and China helps show where India’s hybrid model actually sits between market self-regulation on one end and direct state control on the other, and which institutions are actually responsible for enforcement in each case.

11.1 India: A Fragmented Executive-Led Structure

India does not have one single, consolidated regulator for digital streaming. Instead, oversight is spread across the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which runs the three-tier grievance mechanism under the IT Rules and issues emergency blocking orders under Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000; the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which frames the underlying digital guidelines; and bodies like the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, which steps in only occasionally on child-protection issues rather than keeping continuous watch over platforms. Without an independent statutory authority or any kind of centralised pre-certification system, enforcement stays largely reactive, driven mostly by user complaints, alerts from statutory commissions, or parliamentary committees, rather than any structured compliance cycle.

11.2 United States: Voluntary, Industry-Run Ratings

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has fairly narrow content authority that traditionally does not cover online OTT streaming at all. Its rules on broadcast obscenity and indecency apply strictly to over-the-air public broadcasting, not to cable, satellite, or internet-delivered content. Because of this, the American system relies on voluntary, industry-run rating systems that grew out of television and the Motion Picture Association, leaving platforms to classify their own content by age-appropriateness, under the broad protection of the First Amendment. Consumer protection and children’s privacy are instead handled by the Federal Trade Commission through data-protection laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which shifts the focus away from obscenity filtering and towards protecting commercial data.

11.3 United Kingdom: Ofcom’s Expanding Remit

The United Kingdom has gone further than most common-law countries in setting up formal statutory regulation for streaming. Under the Media Act 2024, Ofcom, which already regulates broadcasting, has been given direct statutory oversight of a new category called “Tier 1” video-on-demand services, meaning platforms with more than 500,000 average monthly UK viewers. Under regulatory codes still being finalised as of mid-2026, Tier 1 platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video will have to follow a binding VOD Standards Code that mirrors the standards traditionally applied to linear broadcasting on harmful content, along with strict accessibility requirements. This lets Ofcom directly investigate viewer complaints and impose real statutory penalties, giving it a level of institutional reach that is quite different from either the American self-regulatory model or India’s executive-driven one.

11.4 European Union: Harmonized Rules, National Enforcement

The European Union regulates digital content distribution through the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which sets baseline standards across all member states while leaving actual enforcement to each country’s own national media authority. A key part of this system is the “country-of-origin” principle, under which a platform is mainly regulated by whichever country it is legally based in, regardless of where its audience actually is. National regulators coordinate with each other through the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services. The European Commission’s detailed review of the Directive, expected in late 2026, is meant to address how much platform influence has grown, the rise of AI, and minor safety across this cross-border digital market.

11.5 China: State Licensing Through the NRTA

China has the most centralised, command-style model of streaming regulation among the major markets. The National Radio and Television Administration, which sits under the State Council, requires digital films, web series, and original shows to get a formal broadcasting licence before they can be released to the public. In effect, this extends the same kind of pre-publication approval used for cinema directly into the digital space, rather than relying on takedowns after the fact. Content standards are set jointly with industry bodies like the China Association of Internet Audiovisual Program Services, and there are strict, platform-wide limits, such as automated “minor protection modes,” meant to directly control how much young viewers can access and engage with.

11.6 Positioning India’s Model

Taken together, these five systems suggest something like a spectrum. The United States sits at the more speech-protective, industry-led self-regulation end. The European Union and the United Kingdom occupy a middle ground, with independent statutory regulators enforcing common baseline standards. China represents a much stricter model of state pre-clearance. India’s IT Rules, 2021 do not really fit neatly anywhere on this spectrum. They avoid China’s pre-publication licensing system, but at the same time, India lacks anything like an independent statutory body comparable to Ofcom or the national media regulators in Europe. Combined with the government’s power to issue centralised blocking orders under Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000, this gives the Indian model a much more executive-driven, interventionist character over individual digital platforms than Western institutional systems generally allow. In this sense, the UK’s move in 2026 towards independent, systemic oversight through Ofcom is probably the closest existing example of what a more autonomous regulatory model in India could look like.

12. Discussion: Tensions Between Free Expression and Regulation

Three tensions keep coming up throughout this discussion. The first is definitional vagueness: neither “obscene” nor “community standards” is defined precisely in any statute, which leaves a lot of discretion in the hands of complainants, the police, and now MIB officials as well. That discretion can be used unevenly, and sometimes for reasons only loosely connected to sexual explicitness at all, such as content perceived as offensive to religious or political sentiment. The second tension is the lack of independent adjudication: unlike CBFC certification, which at least involves a statutory body with defined procedures, the IT Rules’ third tier leaves final oversight with the executive itself, which raises real separation-of-powers and natural-justice concerns. The third is about how proportionate enforcement actually is: blocking an entire platform, rather than just the offending content, is a fairly blunt tool. It might be justified for platforms built mainly around explicit material, but applying it inconsistently to mainstream platforms carrying a few objectionable pieces of content risks being disproportionate. At the same time, those who favour stronger regulation have a fair point too: minors can access OTT content easily on personal devices, there is no pre-release filter comparable to what cinema has, and there are documented cases of platforms hosting material that regulators have described as going well beyond artistic explicitness into outright pornography. These are concerns that a purely free-speech-maximalist approach would struggle to fully address.

13. Findings

• India’s obscenity jurisprudence has genuinely liberalised, moving from the rigid Hicklin test to the more contextual community standards test, but this liberalisation has not been matched by equal definitional clarity at the regulatory level.
• The IT Rules, 2021 fill a real regulatory gap but rely on a post-publication, complaint-driven model with executive-led final oversight, which differs structurally from the independent-body model used for cinema.
• Recent enforcement (2025-26) shows the government is willing to use platform-level blocking as a tool, concentrated so far on platforms built around explicit content rather than mainstream original programming.
• Legal uncertainty persists around vague categories, inconsistent application across platforms, and the constitutionality of executive-led oversight, all of which remain subjects of ongoing litigation.
• Recent cases (2025-2026) show obscenity scrutiny expanding beyond traditional OTT platforms to YouTube-hosted podcasts and panel shows, and show executive blocking orders, rather than adversarial litigation, functioning as the dominant real-world mechanism for resolving obscenity disputes.

14. Combined Recommendations

The recommendations below bring together both parts of this paper, obscenity regulation on one side and the effect of OTT viewing on children on the other, into one connected set of legal and household-level measures.

14.1 Legal and Regulatory

• Statutory definition: Codify a clearer, narrower definition of “obscene” for digital content, drawing on the community standards test and requiring assessment of the work as a whole rather than isolated scenes.
• Graded, audited classification: Introduce a graded, audited content-classification system with periodic third-party compliance review, rather than pure self-classification, for platforms above a defined subscriber threshold.
• Verifiable age-gating: Mandate verifiable age-gating technology for all A-rated content, with penalties tied to platform revenue rather than flat fines.
• Independent oversight body: Replace or supplement the MIB-led third tier with a statutorily independent appellate body, insulated from direct executive control, to hear escalated grievances, and ensure the final Digital Code Rules preserve judicial review and proportionality safeguards consistent with Shreya Singhal.
• Graduated, proportionate enforcement: Prefer content-specific takedowns and age-gating over full platform bans except in cases of platforms substantially or exclusively dedicated to explicit content.
• Transparency in enforcement: Require published reasons for blocking orders and a right of response for affected platforms before action, consistent with principles of natural justice.
• Inter-agency coordination: Strengthen coordination between MeitY, the I&B Ministry, the NCPCR, and state police to pursue corporate entities and repeat offenders behind blocked platforms, not merely their domains.

14.2 Developmental and Parental

• Public awareness and parental tools: Strengthen technical parental-control standards across platforms and invest in public media-literacy campaigns as a complement to, not substitute for, legal regulation.
• Structured viewing routines: Encourage structured, time-bound viewing routines rather than unrestricted access, particularly for children under 12.
• Active parental mediation: Promote co-viewing, discussion of content, and use of parental-control and age-gating features already available on major platforms.
• Media literacy in schools: Integrate digital media literacy into school curricula so children develop critical viewing skills alongside access.
• Further research: Support India-specific longitudinal research isolating OTT-specific viewing from general screen time.
• Default child-safety settings: Encourage platforms to strengthen default settings (autoplay limits, watch-time reminders, content descriptors) rather than relying solely on parents to configure controls.

15. Conclusion

To wrap up, this research highlights a critical turning point in how India deals with digital media. The study focused on two core areas. First, on the legal side, Indian courts have taken a positive step by moving away from the outdated Hicklin test toward a more modern community standards test. However, the ground reality under the IT Rules remains highly problematic. Instead of a clear, independent regulatory process, the system often relies on sudden, executive decisions—like the government’s frequent moves to block platforms—rather than proper judicial review. The line between creative freedom and censorship is still blurry. Second, looking at the social aspect, the findings shift the blame away from the technology itself. The research proves that the problem isn’t the amount of OTT content children consume, but the absence of active parental guidance. A child with a structured and supervised viewing routine is significantly less vulnerable to the negative impacts of explicit media than a child left completely unchecked.

Therefore, the ultimate need of the hour is for the government to enact a dedicated, comprehensive law specifically for OTT platforms. Rather than relying on temporary amendments or broad internet guidelines, a proper statutory law must be framed. This legal framework should establish an autonomous, quasi-judicial regulatory body that ensures a strict balance between protecting public decency and safeguarding the constitutional right to creative expression. Only a well-defined law, combined with responsible parenting, can create a sustainable ecosystem where digital creativity and social safety exist in perfect harmony.

References

A. Table of Cases

1. Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1965 SC 881.

2. Bobby Art International v. Om Pal Singh Hoon, (1996) 4 SCC 1.

3. Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, (2014) 4 SCC 257.

4. K. A. Abbas v. Union of India, AIR 1971 SC 481.

5. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1.

6. Justice for Rights Foundation v. Union of India, W.P.(C) 11164/2018 (Delhi High Court).

7. Aparna Purohit v. State of Uttar Pradesh, (2022) 4 SCC 424.

8. Apoorva Arora v. State (Govt. of NCT of Delhi), 2024 SCC OnLine SC 388.

9. Ranveer Allahbadia v. Union of India, W.P. (Crl.) 83 of 2025 (Supreme Court of India, orders dated 18 February 2025, 3 March 2025, and final order closing Information Technology Act, 2000.

5. The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986.

6. The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

7. Draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, 2023 (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting).

8. Media Act 2024 (UK); Ofcom, draft VOD standards and accessibility Codes for Tier 1 on-demand services, 2026; UK Government, secondary legislation designating Tier 1 video-on-demand services, February 2026.

9. Directive 2010/13/EU (Audiovisual Media Services Directive), as revised by Directive (EU) 2018/1808; European Commission, call for evidence for the 2026 review of the AVMSD.

10. National Radio and Television Administration (China), online audiovisual programme licensing measures, 2022, and subsequent notices on micro-dramas and minor-protection modes for livestreaming platforms.

C. Secondary Sources, Reports, and Other Materials

1. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, statements to the Lok Sabha on OTT platform blocking action, 2025-2026.

2. Bhatia, Gautam. “Obscenity: The Supreme Court Discards the Hicklin Test,” Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy (2014).

3. Various authors, case commentary and analysis on Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, published by LawBhoomi, Drishti Judiciary, and Global Freedom of Expression (Columbia University), accessed 2026.

4. News coverage of 2025-26 OTT platform blocking orders, Storyboard18 and The Bridge Chronicle.

5. Federal Communications Commission, guidance on the scope of FCC content authority over broadcast versus streaming platforms; Federal Trade Commission, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act enforcement; TV Parental Guidelines and Motion Picture Association ratings, best-practices guidance for streaming services.

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