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Censor Board discontinues full access to cuts on website
The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) this month made a key change to a portal it uses to publish 'cut lists' of films, making it harder to routinely review the censorship it imposes on films. The e-Cinepramaan portal, used by studios to submit paperwork for films, and make fee payments for getting their films certified and age-rated, has since 2017 hosted cut lists that the public can review. These cut lists are not searchable on the Censor Board's main website.
The QR code on CBFC certificates points to the film's corresponding e-Cinepramaan page, verifying that the certificate is valid, and providing a list of cuts enforced by the censor board. Since the web addresses of these pages ended with an 18-digit number that could be altered slightly to routinely view newer details of certificates in the order they were issued, it has been possible to have near-total visibility into the cuts demanded by the censors.
For instance, The Hindu reported on the cuts imposed on the Pariyerum Perumal remake Dhadak 2 last month with the help of a code snippet that retrieved the latest films certified by the CBFC. Anti-caste references and political dialogues were muted in the film. The CBFC has increasingly acted to excise political and religious content and symbolism from films.
However, in the end of May, the portal went into 'maintenance', and as of this month, the CBFC has replaced that 18-digit identifier with a token, a string of alphanumeric characters that cannot be meaningfully modified to yield any other certificate. The change appears to be retrospective, essentially breaking existing QR codes on certificates issued in the last eight years.
CBFC certificates are required for any film to be exhibited theatrically, and following a series of court judgments, television channels require one for films too (though TV series do not go through government censors). The Censor Board's chairperson, filmmaker and advertising executive Prasoon Joshi, did not respond to a query by The Hindu on the change made to the site, and neither did the administrative head of the autonomous body.
Director Anurag Kashyap told The Hindu that in addition to the recent developments at the Censor Board, the site making it harder to access cut lists was 'also scary'. 'It's more [focused on] taking information from the person tracking it than giving information, which should anyways be public,' Mr. Kashyap said.
Aman Bhargava, a Bengaluru-based developer and researcher, has led a team of volunteers since December 2024 to retrieve these censorship records and make a slick, interactive website rich with details of over 100,000 individual cuts made to around 20,000 films in the last seven years. Mr. Bhargava shared a working copy of the website, which he was planning on publicly launching in the middle of this month. But then in May, the site went into maintenance, working on the key change that would leave Mr. Bhargava, and others, unable to retrieve this cut data.
'We did work on cleaning descriptions' of cuts, 'extracting metadata, and allowing others to run a pipeline on their own' into the data collected for the project, Mr. Bhargava said. Now, it doesn't look like this project will be able to continue actively. Mr. Bhargava said he was 'disappointed' by the development. 'There was a lot of effort put into this. I think people would have been interested in it. But I guess if this is how things are, we can publish whatever we have.'
The Cinematograph Act, 1952 requires the CBFC to publish certificates it issues to films in the Gazette of India. The CBFC does not do so, it confirmed in an RTI response to The Hindu in May, instead making certificate details available in an unindexed fashion on the e-Cinepramaan portal. The CBFC did not comment on its compliance with this mandate.
CBFC cut lists remain available upon scanning certificates that are provided to multiplexes and cinemas. However, not all certified films end up releasing, and there are nine offices of the CBFC certifying thousands of films, and as such, the scope of films whose cuts can be disclosed publicly has mostly narrowed to theatrically released films already in the cinemas.
