This month, the CBFC Central Council has made a key change in the portal it uses to publish the “lists” of films, making it difficult to check the censorship it imposes on the films. The e-cinepramaan portal, which uses studios to present paperwork for movies and has made payments of fees for obtaining certified films and age assessment, since 2017 he has hosted lists of cuts that the public can check. These cut lists cannot be searched on the main website Censor Board.
The QR code on CBFC certificates points to the corresponding page of the E-CinePramaans and verifies that the certificate is valid, and provides a list of cuts for enforced Censor Council. Since the web addresses of this site have ended with an 18 -digit number that could be slightly changed to display newer details of the certificates in the order in which they were issued, it was possible to have almost overall visibility in the cut censors.
For example, the Hindu reported on the cuts stored on Pariyerum Perumal Remake Dhadak 2 last month using an excerpt of code, which won the latest films certified CBFC. References against caste and political dialogues were suppressed in the film. CBFC has increasingly acted to save political and religious content and symbolism from films.
At the end of May, however, the portal went to “maintenance” and from this month CBFC replaced the 18 -digit token identifier, a string of alphanumeric characters that cannot be meaningfully modified to provide any other certificate. This change seems to be retrospective and basically violates existing QR codes on certificates issued over the last eight years.
CBFC certificates are required to make any film exhibited by a theater and require one for films after a series of judicial judgments (although television series do not go through government censors). The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Censor, Filmmaker and Executive Director of Prasoon Joshi, did not respond to the Hindu question in the change in the place and neither the administrative manager of the autonomous body.
Director Anurag Kashyap told the Hindes that in addition to the recent development in Censor Board, the website was made more difficult to access the “scary” lists. “It’s more (focused on) taking information from a person who followed it than providing information that should be equally public,” said Mr. Kashyap.
Aman Bhargava, developer and research worker based in Bengalur, has led a team of volunteers to obtain these censorship records since December 2024 and has made a neat, interactive website rich with details of more than 100,000 individual cuts over the past seven years. Mr. Bhargava shared a working copy of the website, which he planned publicly in the middle of this month. After that, however, in May, the site got into maintenance and worked on a key change that would leave Mr. Bhargava and other unable to obtain this cut data.
“We were working on cleaning descriptions” of cuts, “Metadata extraction and allowing others to run the pipes separately” into the data collected for the project, Mr. Bhargava said. Now it does not seem that this project will be able to continue actively. Mr. Bhargava said he was “disappointed” by development. “A lot of effort has been made. I think people would be interested. But I think if it is, we can publish anything we have.”
Kinematograph Act, 1952 requires CBFC to publish IT certificates publish films in the Indian Bulletin. CBFC will not do so, confirmed in response to the Hindu Hindu in May, and instead made the details of the certificate in an uninDex way on the e-cinepramaan portal. CBFC did not comment on this mandate.
CBFC cuts remain available for scanning certificates provided by multiplexes and cinemas. However, not all certified films are published and there are nine CBFC offices certifying thousands of films, and therefore the scope of films whose cuts can be publicly published has usually narrowed into theater films already in cinemas.
Published – June 25, 2025 20:54 is
