10th grade results in Kashmir stress unending Internet agony

SRINAGAR, Jammu and Kashmir

Rizwan Geelani, a journalist who covers education for India-administered Jammu and Kashmir’s largest circulated daily Greater Kashmir, was one of few persons who had received by email the results of 10th grade of about 65,000 students. His phone didn’t stop ringing.

The callers were the students or their parents who had got a whiff about Geelani being in possession of the result, gazette released on Thursday.

“But I could hardly tell them the results. I would note down the result of a particular caller and try to SMS her. But then I would get another call. It seemed to take forever. I must have received 100 calls yesterday evening,” he said.

Normally, the students would see their results online but because of the five-month-long Internet gag -- the longest ever in a democracy, according to Access Now advocacy group -- the students were left with two options: contact people who had the gazette, like Geelani, or SMS a request to the education authorities and wait for them to reply.

This reporter saw several journalists at the Media Facilitation Centre, the only place where journalists could access Internet, receive similar requests from relatives and acquaintances. The journalists shuttled between receiving calls, confirming results and writing the day’s most important story on the visit of 15 foreign ambassadors to Kashmir.

Though the students and their parents had a tough time accompanying a task that is normally a click away, most of them had known about their performance by Friday.

But Rohail Nazir, a resident of Srinagar, has been dealt a much harsher blow by the Internet ban. In January last year, he gave up a well-paying job with a pharmaceutical company to start his own business, spending about 600,000 Indian rupees ($8,457) refurbishing his father’s long-closed shop, hiring staff and buying computers.

By Aug. 5, when the Indian government shut Internet and phones besides deploying tens of thousands of soldiers in Kashmir, Nazir, 33, had established a small base of clients, offering them tax and other services. Earnings were nowhere near his salary as pharma salesperson and distributor.

“But I had taken into account the initial hiccups and the fact that it takes time to set up a business before it starts paying,” Nazir told Anadolu Agency.

By September, Nazir said, he realized the Internet ban was there to stay and he had to look for a job. He is the sole breadwinner for his family. He closed his startup, named Business Solutions, and moved to the Indian capital New Delhi to search for a job, as the communications and security lockdown back home had hit businesses badly and jobs were hard to find.

“Established businesses somehow manage setbacks. They could dip into savings. I had no other option than to wind up,” said Nazir, who was in Srinagar for his mother’s heart surgery.

The exact losses suffered by businesses, like Nazir’s, due to Internet shutdown are yet to be quantified, but Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry has estimated $1.4 billion losses suffered by Kashmiri businessmen due to the disturbances caused by the abrogation of special laws on Aug. 5.

Soon after his mother recovers, Nazir plans to leave Kashmir for a job hunt, if the government continues with Internet ban. He calls Indian Supreme Court’s call for a review of the ban “too little and too late”.

“They could have ordered the government to restore Internet immediately,” he said.

Kashmir has the distinction of recording a total of 183 instances of internet shutdowns between January 2016 and October 2019, according to various internet shutdown trackers.