India Porn Ban Update: Blocked Websites Decision Applies Only To Child Pornography, Government Says

Following a ban of 857 websites featuring pornography in India on Saturday, national officials clarified that the ban applied only to websites that featured child pornography, reports from India stated Tuesday.

The problem of child pornography in India was initially brought to the government's attention through a petition effort led by Kamlesh Vaswani, a local lawyer. “(N)othing can more efficiently destroy a person, fizzle their mind, evaporate their future, eliminate their potential or destroy society like pornography,” Vaswani wrote in a public litigation petition he wrote to the Indian government in 2013.

The Ministry of Home Affairs made the decision to block access to the websites and enacted it Saturday as a way to prevent children from accessing erotic images. The ban took effect without any public statement from government leaders on why sites such as Pornhub and Playboy were being blocked.

Adults with their own virtual private networks (VPNs) will still be able to access the blocked sites, authorities said. Some politicians have also argued that the list of 857 cannot cover every porn site available, and that those who are determined to find porn online will still be able to.

"There is no total ban," one Indian official told BBC. "This was done in the backdrop of [the] Supreme Court's observation on children having free access to porn sites. The idea is also to protect India's cultural fabric. This will not prevent adults from visiting porn sites," he said.

When the sites were blocked, many Indians took to Twitter and other forms of social media to voice their discontent. Statistics from the porn website PornHub showed that India was the fourth-largest user of the site worldwide.

Some websites that remain blocked are dating-oriented, and Twitter users have argued that those sites in particular should not have been included in the ban.