1.5 kilometres was the radius on paper. Two kilometres away, at Mandi House, shopkeepers were already telling customers cash only, because UPI had gone dark along with everyone else's data. The map the government drew and the map the shutdown actually followed were never the same map.

A Smaller Radius Is Not the

Same as a Reviewable Order The 2024 Rules were built around one promise: shutdowns would now be geographically precise, "micro-geofenced" to the actual site of disturbance rather than blanket citywide blackouts. What happened at Jantar Mantar tests that promise directly and the test result is mixed in a way that matters for the exam.

What the

1.5-km Radius Actually Fixed To be fair to the reform, it fixed something real. The old 2017 regime under the Telegraph Act carried no defined geographic limit and no duration cap; suspensions could sprawl across entire districts for open-ended periods. The 2024 Rules impose both a radius and a 15-day ceiling, genuine textual constraints that didn't exist before. On paper, this is proportionality doing real work.

What the Radius Didn't Fix But a

declared 1.5-km radius and an actual affected zone are two different things once you're dealing with mobile network infrastructure and Mandi House, nearly two kilometres out, is the evidence. Cell towers don't respect administrative boundaries the way a map does; signal degradation and network rerouting during a localised suspension routinely spill beyond the drawn circle.

The Rules specify a geographic limit for the order, not for its actual technical footprint and nothing in the framework requires post-hoc verification that the two matched.

The Deeper Gap: Precision Without Prior Review Here is the

part that actually matters more than the radius mismatch. Anuradha Bhasin required proportionality and judicial review, but the 2024 Rules operationalise "review" as something that happens after the suspension, through a review committee or eventual litigation, not as a condition the government must clear before issuing the order.

A magistrate or in this case the MHA directly, can suspend service first and defend the decision's proportionality later. "Micro-geofencing" narrows the geography of state power without narrowing its timing: the state still acts unilaterally in the moment and the digital economy underneath that radius, UPI payments, WhatsApp calls, ordinary business, absorbs the consequences before any independent authority has weighed in.

Why This Distinction Is the Actual Exam Point

The failure mode to avoid here is treating "the rules got tighter" as the whole story. They did get tighter, geographically and temporally. But tighter geography without prior authorisation is a narrower version of the same underlying structure Anuradha Bhasin was trying to correct: the state suspends first and the constitutional safeguard arrives only in review.

A UPI-dead shopkeeper at Mandi House experienced that gap directly, two kilometres outside a boundary that was supposed to have kept him untouched. For the exam, the sharpest line is this: proportionality reform that narrows scope without requiring prior independent sign-off manages the optics of overreach without changing its mechanics.