Note: Following this report, other publications and civil society organizations are providing more context on this development. We've got a live blog with everything around the blocks here as a followup to this post. Important: CERT-IN's Gulshan Rai has said that blocks have been implemented on the basis of an order issued by a Court in Gwalior, according to a report from Livemint. Hence, DoT is only implementing the Court's instructions. Earlier today: India's Department of Telecommunications yesterday issued instructions to Internet Service Licensees to block access to 78 URLs from India, and what is evident from the list of URLs is that 73 of these are related to the educational institution IIPM. The order is signed by Subodh Saxena of the DoT. Most surprisingly, the block covers the University Grants Commission, wherein a notice from the UGC pointing towards the unrecognized status of IIPM has been ordered to be blocked. What is worrying is that the blocks include URLs of news portals like Outlook Magazine, Careers360, The Times of India, FirstPost, Rediff, The Indian Express, The Economic Times, MensXP, The Wall Street Journal, The Caravan Magazine, whose reports related to IIPM have been blocked. Apart from this, spoof news site Faking News has 8 URLs in the list (some repeated), while a URL from The Unreal Times has also been asked to be blocked. Also blocked are blog posts from 2005 and 2006 critical of IIPM, including those from Gaurav Sabnis and Rashmi Bansal. Apart from this, URL on consumer…
