When the City Shuts Down: How Protests and Disruptions Hit Indian Businesses, and How to Keep Selling

On 23 July, a message went out to every shop, office and restaurant in Connaught Place, one of Delhi’s busiest commercial districts: close by 6:30 pm. The New Delhi Traders Association issued the advisory after talking to municipal officials, as reported by ANI. That morning the Delhi Metro had shut 16 central stations, with a seventeenth added later.

Two days later the same traders’ association told reporters that its members had been earning only about a quarter of their normal business over the week, according to Telangana Today. The report also pointed to internet disruptions that were affecting digital payments.

This post is not about who was right. A protest movement that started over alleged exam paper leaks, and a fresh set of demonstrations on 2 October over electoral rolls, are political matters we’re not going to weigh in on. What interests us is narrower and more useful: what happens to a business when the street outside it stops working, and what you can set up in advance so it keeps selling anyway.

If you run a shop, a restaurant, a clinic, a coaching centre or a small online store anywhere in India (or Pakistan, where the same dynamics apply), this is for you.

The pattern, in plain terms

Look at what actually happened to those traders. Nobody banned them from selling. The goods were on the shelves and the staff were willing. What disappeared was access: metro stations closed, roads were diverted, police advised people to avoid the area, and offices closed early. One commuter quoted in the coverage said a Noida-to-Mandi House trip that normally takes about 45 minutes took over an hour and a half, per Kashmir Reader. When the trip is that painful, people simply don’t make it.

The 36-day protest was eventually called off, but the problem didn’t end with it. In August, traders in the same market said business was disrupted again, this time by road closures for a municipal rally, as ThePrint reported. One trader asked whether authorities would offer any tax relief for the losses.

The lesson is uncomfortable but practical: any business that depends entirely on people physically arriving is exposed to events it can’t control. Protests, rallies, VIP movements, festivals, flooding, curfews and strikes all do the same thing. A business with a working online channel is exposed to far less of it.

Then there’s the network itself

Disruption doesn’t only happen on roads. Sometimes it happens to the connection.

India has a long record of temporarily suspending mobile or broadband internet in specific areas. Access Now’s annual #KeepItOn report counted 65 shutdowns in India in 2025. As summarised by Indian press, that is the lowest since 2017, but India still accounts for roughly 920 of the 2,102 shutdowns recorded worldwide since 2016. Pakistan recorded 20 in 2025. A summary of the previous year’s data attributed 41 of India’s 84 shutdowns in 2024 to protests.

A few details matter if you sell online:

• They are usually local, not national. Orders typically cover a district or a region, not the whole country.
• They often target mobile data specifically. The News Minute reported that 59% of India’s 2023 shutdowns exclusively affected mobile networks. Your customer may be unable to load your site on their phone even though broadband still works.
• They can run for days. Under India’s 2017 telecom suspension rules, a single order can last up to 15 days, though many are shorter.

If your whole business model assumes a stable mobile connection on both ends, a shutdown is an outage you can’t fix. The goal is not to defeat it. It’s to make sure one broken link doesn’t stop everything else.

What to set up before anything happens

You cannot prepare on the day. The traders who coped best were, almost by definition, the ones who already had other ways to reach customers. Here is what we’d put in place, in rough order of effort.

1. Keep your Google Business Profile current

This is the fastest, cheapest fix, and it takes minutes. When your area is disrupted, update your special hours or mark the business as temporarily closed. Customers who search for you and find hours that are wrong will turn up at a closed door, and they will remember it. If you have never claimed or completed your listing, start with our Google Business Profile guide.

2. Own a way to reach your customers directly

A social media account is rented space. If the platform is slow, blocked or your page is restricted, you lose your audience. Build at least two channels you control:

• A WhatsApp broadcast list for regular customers, with people’s permission.
• An email list, even a short one.
• Your own website, which you control completely.

When something happens, you can send one message: “We’re open for delivery only today. Orders placed before 4 pm will go out tomorrow.” That single message saves a hundred phone calls. We wrote about when WhatsApp beats a contact form and how to set it up properly.

3. Put a status banner on your website

Your homepage should be able to show a short notice, in under a minute, without a developer. Something like “Delivery in the central zone is delayed by one day.” A visitor who sees the notice calls less, complains less and trusts you more than one who has to guess.

This is a simple feature, but most small business sites don’t have it. If yours is hand-coded, ask whoever maintains it to add an editable banner. If you’re on one of our care plans, small updates like this are included.

4. Offer more than one way to pay

This is the single most important point for online sellers, so we’ll be direct. UPI, cards and wallets all need data. If the buyer’s mobile network is down, none of them works. Offer an alternative where it makes sense:

• Cash on delivery for areas where connectivity is unreliable, with a limit on order value.
• Pay on pickup for customers who live nearby.
• Bank transfer or payment links that can be completed later when the connection returns.

It’s a trade-off. Cash on delivery adds returns and refusals, so use it deliberately and for areas where it’s needed, not as the default. If you’re setting up a store, the payment mix is one of the first things we plan. See our e-commerce development page for how we approach it.

5. Make your site light enough to work on a bad connection

When networks are congested or throttled, a heavy website simply fails to load. A lean, fast page can still work on a weak connection. This is one of the quiet advantages of a hand-coded site over a heavy theme with a dozen plugins. Keep images small, avoid unnecessary scripts and test on a real phone with the signal turned down. We explained why load time costs you customers in detail.

6. Plan your delivery promises with a buffer

When roads close, couriers reroute and everything takes longer. Show realistic delivery estimates, and have a way to pause dispatch for one area without turning off your whole store. If you sell on your own site, ask your developer whether you can set delivery rules by pincode or zone.

7. Be thoughtful with your marketing

This one is about judgement, not technology. If your automated ads or scheduled posts keep running cheerfully during a tense day in your city, they can look tone-deaf, and worse, they can send people towards a location they cannot reach. When something significant is happening in an area you serve:

• Pause or narrow location-based ads for the affected area.
• Check your scheduled social posts and email campaigns.
• Keep your public messaging factual and calm.

You do not need to comment on the event itself. You only need to avoid making things worse.

During a disruption: a short script

Keep this somewhere your whole team can find it.

1. Check the situation using official transport and police advisories, not social media rumours.
2. Update your Google Business Profile hours.
3. Post the website banner and send one WhatsApp broadcast.
4. Switch payment and delivery rules if needed (for example, cash on delivery for affected zones).
5. Tell your staff who is working, who is remote, and when you’ll review.
6. Pause location-targeted ads.
7. Review at the end of the day, and write down what worked.

After it’s over

The most valuable thing you can do is a ten-minute review while it is fresh. What did customers ask? Which messages were missing? Where did you lose orders? Turn the answers into a one-page plan you can reuse. The next disruption might be a festival, a flood or a strike rather than a protest, and a plan written once serves for all of them.

If your website was part of the problem, because it was slow, confusing or impossible to update, that is fixable. Our website redesign service rebuilds sites without throwing away the search visibility you already have. For stores, our launch checklist shows what to check before you go live.

What this is really about

The traders in Connaught Place were not careless. They had good locations, loyal customers and years of experience. What they lacked, like most small businesses everywhere, was a second door. A second door doesn’t have to be sophisticated. It can be a clear website, a tidy Google listing, a WhatsApp number that gets answered and a couple of ways to pay.

Building that second door is far cheaper before a crisis than during one. If you’d like help with it, talk to us. We’ll tell you straight what your business needs and what it doesn’t.