The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has removed public access to details of cuts introduced to films and information that it is legally required to publish from its website. The section mentioning the cut list has been displaying “under maintenance” for several days.

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As a result, there is no way to find out cuts made to films currently showing in theatres or scheduled to release soon. This comes months after the censor board made it impossible to automatically fetch cut lists from its website as and when films were certified.

The move comes at a time when the censor board’s institutional norms have weakened significantly. It has recently been accused of delaying certification for films like Kangana Ranaut-starrer Emergency and C. Joseph Vijay-starrer Jana Nayagan, while withholding certification for Honey Trehan directorial Satluj, which was briefly released online before being pulled down by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The Bombay and Madras High Courts have criticised the CBFC’s actions, with filmmakers accusing the autonomous body of giving in to political pressure.

The CBFC’s cut lists have long served as a record of changes ordered to films, making it possible to track the growing politicisation of film censorship, particularly when films contain anti-establishment themes, and a tendency to suppress films depicting casteism, religious prejudice, and could even have a bearing on India’s foreign relations. The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film on the killing of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza by Israeli forces, was not certified for weeks due to geopolitical concerns. In 2023, The Hindu reported how the CBFC’s cuts reflected these trends based on a review of hundreds of cut lists retrieved through a piece of code. 

Although cut lists are accessible on the CBFC’s e-Cinepramaan portal by scanning the QR code on a film’s certificate, on or prior to July 15, the censor board took down the tabulated cut lists for all films from its website. The censor board inserted a message in its place, saying “Part II of the certificate [the cut list] is currently under maintenance.” It is unclear what there is to maintain on a digital table — the CBFC did not address pointed queries on the nature of this “maintenance” in response to The Hindu.

“Various portions of the CBFC e-Cinepramaan system are currently undergoing long-overdue technical maintenance to improve citizen centricity, user experience, and to consistently implement various mandatory rules and compliances within the online workflow,” CBFC chairperson Shashi Shekhar Vempati’s office told The Hindu. “As and when the technical maintenance process is completed, the functionality shall be restored and the same shall be intimated through the website.”

The removal of the cut lists is the latest in a series of steps taken in recent years to limit public access to censorship records. In mid-2025, the CBFC altered the URL of each film’s cut list webpage, making the retrieval of batches of cut information impossible. Many descriptions within cut lists have also become less detailed, excluding the specific information about scenes or dialogues. Moreover, the National Film Development Corporation’s archive in Pune no longer receives censored portions of films for research purposes.

Section 5A(2) of the Cinematograph Act, 1952, has an explicit mandate that certificates should be published in the Gazette of India. Archival records examined by The Hindu at the Delhi Public Library show Gazette notifications from the previous century contained periodic certificate updates from the CBFC.

It is unclear when that practice stopped. Until 2017, when the e-Cinepramaan portal was launched as a part of a digitisation drive, cut lists were searchable on the CBFC’s website. While the CBFC’s main website still has a searchable directory of certified films, it no longer displays cuts ordered by the board.

Published - July 27, 2026 08:58 pm IST