VPN for India(भारत)

India's internet runs through five major ISPs — Jio (the largest, with 480M+ subscribers), Airtel, BSNL, Vi (Vodafone Idea), and ACT Fibernet. CERT-In, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team under the Ministry of Electronics and IT, is the cybersecurity regulator that issues binding directives to internet infrastructure operators.

The relevant rule is CERT-In's April 2022 directive. It requires VPN, cloud, and data-center providers operating physical infrastructure inside India to retain customer KYC data — name, address, IP allocation, contract period, payment record, declared purpose of use — for **five years**. It also mandates 6-hour incident reporting for any cybersecurity event.

The directive applies to providers with infrastructure in India. It does not directly regulate end users. But because most reputable no-logs VPN providers refused to log their customers, they responded by physically removing their Indian servers. NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, ProtonVPN, Mullvad, and IPVanish all withdrew physical India presence in mid-2022. They now serve "Indian IPs" through virtual servers in Singapore, the Netherlands, and London.

In January 2025, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) ordered Apple and Google to remove specific VPN apps from Indian app stores. Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, Hide.me, PrivadoVPN, Touch VPN, and X-VPN were confirmed removed. Major brands (NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Proton, Mullvad, PIA) had not been notified for removal as of that date.

India is not a state-level censorship environment in the China or Iran sense. There is no countrywide deep packet inspection programme blocking VPN protocols. Most days, WireGuard and OpenVPN both work without any obfuscation needed.

What does happen: the Department of Telecommunications periodically orders ISPs to block specific URLs or apps under Section 69A of the IT Act. Recent examples include the 2020 ban on TikTok and 59 other Chinese apps, the 2021 short-lived block of Twitter accounts during farmer protests, and various pornography-site blocks since 2018. These are URL/IP-level blocks, not protocol-level — a VPN trivially routes around them.

The Doda district of Jammu & Kashmir imposed a 2-month VPN-use ban in May 2025 under BNSS Section 163. This was the first regional-level enforcement targeting VPN use itself rather than VPN providers, and it was geographically scoped to one district during a specific security situation.

Internet shutdowns are the more common tactic. India had 84 documented shutdowns in 2024 per Access Now's KeepItOn report — the highest of any country for the seventh consecutive year. Most are regional and brief, ordered during civil unrest. A VPN does not help if the entire mobile network is shut down at the cell-tower level.

Three concrete reasons most Indian users want a VPN. First, public Wi-Fi: Indian café and hotel networks are often unsecured, and a VPN prevents passive sniffing of traffic on those networks. Second, streaming: accessing Netflix US, BBC iPlayer, or other geo-restricted catalogues. Third, ISP visibility: Jio, Airtel, and BSNL log DNS queries by default, and that data has been requested under court orders in defamation cases.

For diaspora users abroad, the reverse use case applies: getting an Indian IP to access JioHotstar, Hotstar (cricket especially during IPL season March-May), Disney+ Hotstar India catalogue, and Indian banking sites that geo-fence their login pages.

Fexyn does not operate any physical servers in India. Our infrastructure is in Frankfurt, Helsinki, Cyprus, and Ashburn. The CERT-In 5-year log mandate does not apply to our infrastructure because there is no Fexyn infrastructure in India to which it could apply. We serve Indian IPs the same way every other reputable no-logs provider does — via virtual servers physically located outside India.

This is not a limitation. It is the trade-off the entire reputable VPN industry made in 2022 to keep their no-logs commitments intact. We are honest about it because the major brands are not — writing "we left India" is awkward marketing for them, so they say nothing. Fexyn additionally issues 24-hour short-lived certificates from a Vault PKI, so even a server-side compromise has a hard time horizon. We don't log browsing history, DNS queries, or traffic content.

Sign up at fexyn.com/pricing — Tier 4 pricing is $2.99/month. The 7-day free trial does not require a card upfront. Card payment via Stripe works on most Indian Visa and Mastercard credentials; UPI is not yet supported. Crypto payment via OXProcessing works as an alternative.

Install the Windows app from fexyn.com/download/windows. On first connect, the app picks Fexyn Bolt (WireGuard) by default. Choose any non-India server location — Frankfurt is closest to most Indian users with the best latency, typically 130-180ms. For streaming Netflix US or BBC iPlayer, pick a server in the relevant country.

If your ISP starts filtering VPN traffic (no major Indian ISP does this today, but the regulatory direction is uncertain), switch the protocol from Bolt to Stealth in the app's settings. Stealth uses VLESS Reality and looks like normal HTTPS traffic to any DPI system.