Thousands of websites are blocked in India. Surprisingly, most of them are genuine, legal and perfectly legitimate websites, like a file host such as Rapidshare or an image host, although some fall in grey areas like websites that serve pornographic material or torrents. But these grey areas are also because of the social rules and not entirely legal. In India, by law, neither bans watching porn nor stops people from downloading a legitimate video such as Big Buck Bunny through a torrent site.
Update: In 2018, Indian government has apparently banned many more sites in the country, including popular but controversial -- yet legal -- websites like torrent tracker RARBG or porn sites like Xvideos and Pornhub. But apparently Indian internet users have figured out a way to access these blocked websites.
Update: And yet again there are hundreds of more sites have been blocked in India, including popular porn sites like Pornhub and Xvideos. Right now, people are saying that the sites are prominently banned on Jio network, but actually the ban is in response to a directive by Department of Telecom, reports PTI. Over 800 websites have been banned. Now, use methods to access the websites that have been blocked if they are illegal but if it is a popular website like Wikipedia that has been banned, may be try a few tricks.
Some are down below and they have been explained, but the idea is simple: use a VPN. Earlier there were no good free VPNs but now there are VPNs built into browser and that can help you bypass the local ban.
So how do you access a legitimate website that is banned in India?
India Today Tech will tell you. But before that some context and a disclaimer.
Since last few years, India is blocking websites left and right. Most of the time the websites have been blocked on the basis of John Doe orders, which are so vague and arbitrary that even courts that have agreed to them are now raising eyebrows and striking a word of caution. Many more sites are banned due to some random decision somewhere else, likely taken on the basis of a link that then led to blocking of the whole site. So non-transparent and arbitrary is this whole exercise that is possible that Indian government doesn't even know how many websites have been blocked in the country and on what reasons.
Now a disclaimer: Although the method here will help you access almost any site that is blocked in India, if you do so we are not responsible for any legal repercussions of it. We only tell you how a blocked URL can be accessed in India. We can't tell whether it is legal to do so or not.
With this out, the method: It is very simple. Just use the latest version of Opera browser. The Opera browser, which is now in version 41, has an inbuilt VPN or in other words a virtual private network. This VPN allows a web users to easily bypass the filters that Indian internet service providers run because it ensures that first a user connects to a computer outside India and then connects to the site that you are accessing. To use Opera's VPN feature, here is what you need to do: