India's OTT code lets a platform grade its own content

The figure or the record

India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 via G.S.R. 139(E) on 25 February 2021, publishing them in the Gazette of India the same day. Part III of the rules, the Digital Media Ethics Code, applies to publishers of online curated content, the category a streaming or short-video app falls under, and requires the publisher to classify its own content before making it available. The rules were later amended by G.S.R. 794(E) on 28 October 2022 and G.S.R. 275(E) on 6 April 2023, though those amendments mainly reshaped intermediary and online-gaming provisions elsewhere in the text, not the classification system in Part III.

What the documents establish

Rule 8's Code of Ethics sets five content ratings, U, U/A 7+, U/A 13+, U/A 16+ and A, defined by which age group the content suits and which can view it with parental guidance. A publisher must display the rating and a content descriptor at the start of every programme, and, for anything rated U/A 13+ or above, must make access control mechanisms, including parental locks, available; content rated A additionally requires a reliable age verification mechanism. Grievances against a publisher's own classification or content run through a stated three-tier structure: Level I self-regulation by the publisher itself, Level II a self-regulating body of publishers, and Level III government oversight, with a publisher's own grievance officer required to acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours.

Scope and caveats

This is a self-classification regime: the rules require a publisher to grade its own catalogue against the five tiers and the Schedule's guidance on themes, violence, nudity, sex, language, substance use and horror, but no government body pre-approves the rating before publication, and this record found no separate mechanism requiring third-party sign-off before a title goes live. The document opened here is a consolidated, updated text current to 6 April 2023, retrieved from the ministry's site and cross-checked against an archived copy of the same file dated 21 November 2024, which shows the same classification language; this account did not open a separately-hosted ministry source and could not independently corroborate Part III enforcement activity.

What to watch

Editorially, the detail worth tracking is how a romance-and-revenge micro-drama catalogue, heavy on the sex and themes-and-messages descriptors the Schedule names, is actually rated by exporting platforms in practice, since a self-classification system's accuracy depends on what publishers choose to disclose, not on a regulator checking each title first.

• What rating does the exporting platform's own India-facing app declare for its most explicit unlockable titles, and does it match the Schedule's stated criteria?
• Does the app implement the parental-lock requirement for U/A 13+ content, and an age-verification step for anything rated A?
• Has any Level II or Level III grievance decision been published naming a short-video or micro-drama publisher specifically?

The rules give a workable classification vocabulary and a specific procedural ladder, but they leave the honesty of the rating to the publisher applying it, which makes the self-declared tier a starting point for scrutiny rather than a guarantee.