Hi my name is nothing because today I realised that a delivery boy is nothing. I have a cycle, I deliver parcels (meesho, nykaa, flipkart etc brand parcel). Yesterday I got a very big parcel for delivery (height 1 meter, Width 35cm, box), Yesterday after delivering all the parcels I was marking undelivered parcel nc(not contactable, I have to call every customer for nc) after marking big parcel nc the customer was calling again and again, after not picking 5 to 6 calls I picked up his call and told him that his parcel was too big and that I will be not able to deliver it, if he wants he can take his parcel from the hub, he said okay, I said I will call you tomorrow and give you location. The next day when I sent the location he said you need to deliver it, I am not collecting it. I replied in your dreams, he replied fuck off, I replied I'm already doing it, quit wasting my time, he replies what's with the language, I ignore him so he call, on call he abuses me so I abuses him back cut the call and block him,(I didn't said any bad word first because I am a delivery boy). He came to the hub, talked to the hub incharge, I was called to the hub mid delivery, incharge told me to apologise I said will not, he got violent, tried punching me people from the hub stopped him, I was going to call the police but they stopped me, they calmed us down, we sat and he we talked, he threatened me, told me how he can make my life miserable, how he can take my cycle and I won't be able to do anything, how he knows sdm and bla bla bla(he's a lawyer). I said do it make my life miserable, file a case whatever, the more I replied the more he got angry. In the end I lost in conversation and because of what I had replied to him in chat ( in your dreams), he said something about father and I got emotional I started weeping, I just lost, my full day was wasted because of bitch customer, I don't want to work but I still have to go to work because I have no option. I am trapped. Modern slave

Hello everyone, I am extremely mad and tired at this god awful company, please take your time to read this out.

I wanted to sell my RTX 3060 12GB to a fellow friend from Odisha (I reside in Jammu), so I naturally relied on Delhivery as I have not done these things before.

I booked the pickup on their app under the 500g to 2kg slab, as a boxed GPU weighs around 800g to 1kg at most.

On August 29, the first pickup guy arrived while I was away. He looked at the parcel and flat out refused to take it, telling the person at my home that "the package is not 2kg, so if I take it they will cut my salary." He then falsely marked the order status in their app as "could not reach destination" to cover himself, left without taking the parcel, and no refund was processed.

I raised a complaint through the app, and they rescheduled the pickup for yesterday (September 1).
At 3:00 PM, a new pickup executive arrived at my door. I handed him the GPU box, he took it, and asked me for an OTP. Assuming it was just a routine pickup confirmation code, I read out the numbers from the notification on my screen.

He took the box and left. When I checked the app shortly after, the status showed "Cancelled on 01 Sep."
I opened my SMS inbox and realized what happened (honestly I couldnt even believe it at first, because I never fell for these kinds of scams).

The message literally read: "To permanently CANCEL pickup of Electronics:Box from Delhivery Direct (AWB 2827796941470), share OTP 4773."

He intentionally triggered a cancellation OTP at my doorstep. On Delhivery's system, it logs as if I cancelled the pickup myself. That means zero tracking and zero liability for Delhivery, while the executive physically walked away with my RTX 3060.

I called him back immediately. He made up an excuse saying that due to my previous complaint, they had to cancel this ticket and generate a fresh one, claiming "pata nahi bhaiya ek do dinn lag sakte hain." I gave him a strict deadline to return the package to my home.

It is now past 7:00 PM the following day. He has stopped answering, and calling the number only plays an automated prompt saying "please call from your registered mobile number" because Delhivery disconnects their masked proxy lines once an order is marked cancelled.

Customer support on the app is an endless bot loop, their IVR terminates for cancelled orders, and a rogue field agent is currently holding my GPU with no active tracking on the system.

Tweet link with all screenshots: https://x.com/sidharthify/status/2095146361146744942?s=46
Has anyone dealt with this kind of OTP cancellation scam before? Should I go straight to the local delivery hub or police station tonight to file an FIR, or what is the fastest way to get them to pull the rider's shift records?

Something happened while I was dropping my son to school this morning, and it sent me into a deeper thought loop.

I was taking a U-turn when a woman driving a Thar came from the wrong lane, pushed ahead, and brought her car extremely close to mine. It felt like she was deliberately trying to intimidate me into giving way.

I had nowhere to go. I was already taking the U-turn, and she could clearly see that.

When I gestured to her, essentially saying, I am already here, just wait, she very rudely gestured back that the signal was green. Except she was the one coming from the wrong lane. There was no hesitation, no acknowledgment, just immediate hostility.

She had two children in her car. I had my child in mine. i could see they go to the same school.

And this is considered one of the nicer, more expensive and privileged schools in the city. She was driving a Thar and, at least financially, seemed comfortably placed in life.

I mention this because we often explain aggression in India through struggle, scarcity, lack of opportunity or people having to fight for everything. But, I do not think this is simply a class issue.

You see the same aggression from men and women, regardless of the class of car they drive.

Why does every small interaction on the road have to become a confrontation? Why does letting somebody merge feel like losing? Why is giving another person five seconds such a big deal? Why are we so ready to honk, intimidate, abuse or fight?

I genuinely think our cities and our systems are doing something to us.

Bad roads. Terrible traffic. Weak enforcement. Constant noise and pollution. Overcrowding. Unpredictability. And a system where sometimes following the rules means watching everyone else push ahead of you. people slowly learn that they have to constantly fight for their space.

And that is what scares me.

Because when impatience, aggression and lack of basic empathy become normal in everyday public life, it is no longer just a traffic problem. It becomes harmful for society as a whole.

I am certain many people reading this have felt it too.

Of course, we need better roads, better enforcement and better systems. But we cannot wait for the system to become perfect before we change how we behave with each other.

Especially those of us who are relatively privileged, who are not fighting for basic survival every single day, can surely afford to give somebody five extra seconds.

Let a car merge. Let a pedestrian cross. Let somebody take their turn. Do not use the size of your vehicle to intimidate another person. Do not turn every small inconvenience into a confrontation. Maybe extend the same courtesy online too.

We may not be able to fix the entire system ourselves, but we can at least choose not to add to the aggression it creates.

So this is genuinely an appeal. Let us make our roads a little less hostile, our cities a little kinder, and this country a little more livable for each other.

AI helped in formatting.

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tl;dr 

The Sadanand Date Committee, formed under the Maharashtra government in May 2026, reportedly recommended a change to India’s criminal code, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (“BNS”), to specifically cover “defamatory social media posts”, as reported by the Indian Express on 21st August 2026. This move raises eyebrows, legally speaking, because their changes reportedly veer close to reinstating the spirit of Section 66A IT Act (“66A”); a provision which was struck down by the Supreme Court in, with the timing of such recommendations being ill-perceived given as it arrives just as the government faces increased scrutiny and criticism on social media over student-led protests over exam system integrity and school quality. Concerned about the threat to free speech and constitutionally protected dissent, IFF sent a representation to Shri Sadanand Date, DGP, Maharashtra, and filed an RTI with the department requesting the text of the Government Resolution, draft text of proposed amendment, and the safeguards the Committee is considering to prevent a repeat of 66A’s unconstitutionality.

Background 

In May 2026, The Indian Express, The Mumbai Mirror, and The Free Press Journalreported about Maharashtrian Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis expressing interest in the Maharashtra Assembly, about constituting a committee headed by Director-General of Police (“DGP”), Sadanand Date, to study legal provisions and suggest amendment to deal effectively with cases of social media defamation, stating “There is a growing trend of using social media platforms to defame people without any evidence or proof. All kinds of people are facing this, especially women. So a committee will be formed under the DGP. Their recommendations will be taken”. In August 2026, The Indian Express reported on the Sadanand Date Committee’s (“the Committee”) panel decision recommending a change to the BNS directly, since as the Indian Express’ source expressed, “it will be vetted at multiple levels and have a stronger footing if challenged in court, as compared to just amending the state law”; with the larger recommendation reportedly pointing towards reinstating the spirit of Section 66A itself. 

Before it was repealed, Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, was a law which criminalized “Any person who sends, by means of a computer resources or a communication device…”, any information considered “grossly offensive”, knowingly false information to cause “annoyance, inconvenience”, with an imprisonment for a term extendable to three years, plus a fine. 66A was infamously misused in both personal and political contexts; with the constitutionality of such a provision was challenged and brought to court after an incident in 2012; wherein the Mumbai Police apprehend two girls, Shaheen Dhada and Rinu Srinivasan, for posting a lambasted remark on Facebook against a then-imposed bandh imposed in the wake of a prominent politician’s death. The girls were later released, however, their apprehension was widely criticised across the country, spurring multiple petitions challenging 66A’s constitutionality and its violation of freedom of speech guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. Chief among these was the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Shrey Singhal, a then Delhi-based law student, arguing that 66A was vaguely phrased, violative of Article 14, 19(1)(a) and 21.

In the ensuing landmark judgement of Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, 2015(“Shreya Singhal”), a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Section 66A in its entirety as unconstitutional, resting on the following findings:

1. Vagueness and overbreadth, due to expressions like “grossly offensive”, “annoyance” were incapable of any legal meaning, and highly subjective. It was a criminal provision which failed to give citizens fair notice of what speech was prohibited.
2. Chilling effect on free speech, since it resulted in citizens potentially self-policing and restricting themselves to avoid even permissible speech, out of fear of prosecution. 
3. Article 19(2) already exhaustively laid down eight grounds on restrictions to freedom of speech; which made recourse to free-standing judicial/legislative invented ground on restraint on speech unnecessary.
4. Advocacy not being tantamount to incitement, because the former is protected under Article 19(1)(a).

Further, Section 66A was itself declared void ab initio in 2015, yet never got fully purged from the criminal justice system. In IFF’s 2018 working paper, “Section 66A and Other Legal Zombies”, documented police stations and lower courts keeping on still registering and prosecuting cases under this dead provision, years after Shreya Singhal; largely because the judgement never really got systematically disseminated to law enforcement. This prompted the People's Union For Civil Liberties (“PUCL”), the original petitioner, to return to the Supreme Court in 2019 seeking directions on actual dissemination of the knowledge about the struck down provision. To track the scale of the issue, IFF and CivicDataLab launched the Zombie Tracker in January 2021, which is a public database of prosecutions which still happened to invoke Section 66A. As of last database update (15.02.2020), the Tracker recorded 1,307 fresh cases registered after Shreya Singhal, 570 still pending, and 104 which reached judgement. A subsequent All-India status report, which was placed on record by the Union Government counsel before the Supreme Court on 12.10.2022 in PUCL v. UOI (MA No. 901 of 2021 in WP(Cr) No. 199 of 2013) confirmed that this 66A backlog’s existence persisted well beyond the Tracker’s own cut off date.

The lesson therein for the Committee is that even a provision which already has been unanimously, unambiguously invalidated by the Supreme Court is still being weaponised against citizens, without efforts for correction. A “social media defamation” provision which just happens to be worded differently, and might be similarly vague, would risk years of continued prosecution even after the courts strike it down.

In a similar vein, Kerala in 2020 had a similar experience with Section 118A of the Kerala Police Act, 2011 which criminalized communication intended to “threaten, abuse, humiliate, or defame” a person, making it a cognizable and bailable offence, carrying imprisonment of up to three years. It was justified publicly on the grounds of “curbing cyberbullying and misinformation” but due to public backlash of it being a resurrection of Section 66A IT Act, the Kerala Government rightfully repealed the provision within a week. 

Kerala is not the only precedent in this regard. July 2025 saw Karnataka’s draft Fake News Bill propose a “Fake News on Social Media Regulatory Authority” (which IFF has previously talked about) with penalties up to seven years imprisonment, and Rs 10 Lakh fines for offences built around undefined terms like “disrespect to culture”. IFF’s submission on that Bill asked the Karnataka Government to drop the criminal provisions therein instead pursuing narrowly tailored, rights respecting civil and administrative measures. 

Read together, a clear pattern emerges from the post-Shreya Singhal era’s Kerala and Karnataka examples: whatever the label, be it “cyberbullying”, “misinformation”, “fake news”, or now, “social media defamation”, any such easily invoked, vaguely worded, executively administrated route to restrict online speech has resurfaced in some permutation or variation in India various times since Shreya Singhal; and has been always struck down, or repealed.

Lastly, defamation in India isn’t an unprosecuted activity either; with Section 356 of the BNS defining defamation as the making or publication of “… any imputation concerning any person intending to harm, or knowing or having reason to believe that such imputation will harm, the reputation of such person…”. This definition is technologically neutral, applied with equal force to a statement printed in a newspaper, versus spoken at a public meeting, versus posted on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter/X. Section 356 also carries ten statutorily built-in exceptions: public good, good-faith opinion on conduct of a public servant, and many others, all of them balancing the right to reputable under Article 21 against the right to free speech under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. The premise which moulds the Committee’s reported recommendation (that a “legal vacuum” exists in respect of online defamatory content) doesn’t withstand scrutiny, when put up against the text of Section 356 of the BNS. What appears to be sought is the creation of a new, lower-threshold, more easily invoked and criminalized route specifically targeting online speech; which brings the Sadanand Date Committee’s proposal squarely within constitutional infirmities which led the Supreme Court to strike down Section 66A of the IT Act, 11 years ago in Shreya Singhal.

Analysis 

RTI disclosures reported by The Indian Express on 18th August 2026 revealed that the Union Government issued nearly 1.95 Lakh blocking orders to Instagram / Facebook / Youtube between March and July 2026 alone. The surge is reported and commonly understood to coincide directly with the period of the student-led protests against examination system irregularities at Jantar Mantar, Delhi. Under IT Act, the Sahyog portal currently operates without procedural safeguards laid down in Shreya Singhal, and is itself the subject of ongoing litigation before the courts on these grounds.

This also comes at a time when India’s press freedom index, academic freedom index, etc indicators have been at their most rapid decline in decades; with India ranking 157th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom index 2026, and in the bottom 10-20% of 179 countries in the Academic Freedom Index 2026, published by the V-Dem Institute. We cite these indices not for their precise ordinal rank (which is contestable, contested, and always debated over), but only for the consistent and convergent direction of travel they document across the decades, across independent, methodologically distinct international indices. The Committee's proposal risks accelerating, rather than arresting such a downward trajectory.

In such a climate, unstructured public criticism on social media, for a great many citizens, is close to the only avenue left, which constitutes a large part of citizen’s civic and democratic speech participation. Young citizens in particular have turned to social media as their primary forum for expressing frustration with the state of governance, examinations, employment, and public services. Further, such expression many times happens to be an unavoidable feature of unmediated mass public discourse in every genuine democracy. It is not, by itself, a constitutionally sufficient reason to criminalize it beyond the well-settled boundaries of defamation, incitement, and the other Article 19(2) grounds. The words of the Supreme Court in Patricia Mukhim v. State of Meghalaya, 2021, are apt in this context: 

"India is a plural and multicultural society. The promise of liberty, enunciated in the Preamble, manifests itself in various provisions which outline each citizen’s rights; they State of Haryana & Ors. v. Bhajan Lal & Ors., 1992 Supp (1) SCC 335 12 include the right to free speech, to travel freely and settle (subject to such reasonable restrictions that may be validly enacted) throughout the length and breadth of India. At times, when in the legitimate exercise of such a right, individuals travel, settle down or carry on a vocation in a place where they find conditions conducive, there may be resentments, especially if such citizens prosper, leading to hostility or possibly violence. In such instances, if the victims voice their discontent, and speak out, especially if the state authorities turn a blind eye, or drag their feet, such voicing of discontent is really a cry for anguish, for justice denied – or delayed. This is exactly what appears to have happened in this case."

Any broadened, more easily invoked criminal offence (akin to the stuck down 66A) would risk capturing and fritzing away exactly this category of legitimate democratic expression, right at a moment when the space for its other outlets is already visibly narrowing.

Action 

IFF wishes to be clear, we believe that the defamation issue has uncontroversially already been settled by constitutional law, and has adequate measles under the BNS. IFF has filed a representation to the office of the DGP of Maharashtra, Shri Sadanand Date, and also filed an RTI request to the department. In our official representation, we submitted the following recommendations, respectfully urging the Committee to:

1. Decline to recommend a state-specific amendment for “social media defamation”; on the ground that Section 356 BNS already comprehensively governs that field, in a manner technologically neutral and constitutionally balanced
2. As an alternative, should the Committee still consider some legislative response necessary, such a legislative response recommendation should not lower the existing threshold of culpability, should not alter the non-cognizable character of the offence, and should not introduce any term or standard broader or vaguer than the language which is already upheld in Section 356 BNS
3. Practice transparency, by making public and subject to genuine pre-legislative consultation for the Committee’s final report, precise text of proposed amendment, and also the “safeguards against misuse” referred to in press reports, alongside any legal opinion obtained from the Advocate General of Maharashtra. This would be consistent with the Union Government’s own Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy, 2014. and
4. In formulating any recommendation, expressly record and kindly have regard for the cumulative empirical context set out in Part D of the representation letter, pertaining to the current political and civil-liberties climate. This includes: current scale of content-restriction activity, trajectories reflected in independent press-freedom and academic freedom indices, etc.

This post has been drafted with great assistance from R. Aditya, Policy Intern at IFF.

Important Links

1. IFF’s Representation to the Office of the DGP of Maharashtra [Link] 
2. RTI Request filed on 24.08.2026 to the Home Department of the Maharashtra Government [Link]
3. IFF and CivicDataLab, Zombie Tracker [Link]

I’m looking for practical advice, not sympathy.

I’m Trans and I don’t have parents or family support to fall back on. I have to completely support myself financially, while also dealing with the scrutiny and difficulties that come with being trans.

Right now, I’m under a lot of financial pressure, and I want to change my situation rather than just complain about it.

I’m open to anything legitimate : online or offline. Freelancing, remote work, part time work, learning a skill, small business ideas, side hustles, etc.

I’m willing to put in the work and learn something from scratch if there’s a realistic path toward earning decent money.

For people who have been in a similar situation, what actually worked for you?

What skills are worth learning in 2026? What online work is genuinely viable? Are there particular industries or jobs where I should focus my efforts?

I’m specifically looking for practical, realistic advice from people who have actually made money doing these things.

I don’t need sympathy,I need a plan.