These days, funny man Cyrus Broacha has to do something he has never done before in his professional life - submit the script of his show to his channel for approval. "I am actually tense when the script is returned to me because I fear they may ask me to drop things that I feel are really funny and important for the show," he says about his programme The Other Week That Wasn't, aired on television channel Comedy Central.

And even then there is no respite. "Once we submit the programme to the channel, it is beyond our control. Things can change even there," Broacha says. A joke about a political leader, he explains, fell flat because the name of the leader was beeped out when it went on air.

It's a trend that's worrying television artistes. Broacha points out that his weekly news comedy show The Week That Wasn't, aired on CNN-IBN for almost nine years, never had to counter censors. But, increasingly, people in general entertainment channels (GECs) are being made to tone down something that any odd viewer may find irreverent or racy. "They fear everybody, from the audience to the government and the courts," Broacha says.

In these days of rampant clampdowns on speech, television companies are wielding a sharp pair of scissors on anything they feel the audience may object to.

And the audience, it seems, objects to a wide range of words and images - from bikinis, blood and assault weapons, to beef, hell, sex and bra. Television channels are going to such great lengths to ensure that nothing offends people who are easily offended that in a recent episode of a Western TV show, a nude statue in the background was blurred out.

Spoken words are also toned down in subtitles - in one instance, "sex" became "intercourse" and "shit" turned into "crap".

The focus is on foreign series - where words such as f*$k are used as punctuation marks and cleavages are just a part of the human body. In a recent episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, currently being shown on FX, one of the characters suspects that a restaurant is hiring only "large-breasted" women - which, she feels, should be reported to government authorities. The word "breast" was beeped out and also not shown in the subtitles, leaving viewers completely at sea. Scenes with a cleavage display and a discussion on "faking" were deleted. And this was on a late night show meant for "adult" or "mature" viewers and not expected to be viewed by children.

"They totally take the fun out of shows such as Two and Half Men and Family Guy with this very bad mutilation of dialogues and scenes," says Atul Dandekar, a Mumbai-based architecture student who is a regular watcher of English sitcoms. "These are comedies with a bit of sexual banter but we Indians are mature enough to handle them," he adds.

The censorship is gaining ground even though programmes on television don't need certification, unlike films. They are, however, expected to follow the programme code of the information and broadcasting ministry.

The code, for instance, says that programmes should not flout "good taste and decency", or "contain anything obscene" or "denigrate women". The shows should not "deprave, corrupt or injure the public morality or morals". None of the terms is clearly defined - leaving them open to interpretation.

But every programme that viewers watch on television has to pass through the fine-toothed comb of in-house standards and practices (S&P) departments. The pauses, bleeps, and even sudden cuts and jumps in scenes that you notice on television are possibly the handiwork of a channel's S&P section.

None of the channels The Telegraph approached wants to go on record on this. But the head of the S&P department of a channel concedes that they are being a little too careful with the content.

"We don't know what might offend people or the courts or even the government. In a way we are crawling while we have been asked to bend," the insider says.

Some say the channels' fears are justified. Besides the in-house censors, broadcasters are wary of the industry body, Broadcasting Content Complaints Council (BCCC), which viewers can approach with complaints on any content they find offensive. And then there is also the government-owned Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) which monitors 600 channels around the clock - apart from the courts.

"There have been court rulings in the past that have meant that some channels have gone off air for a while because of what the court found to be an inappropriate broadcast of content. Hence, all channels are careful regarding what content they air, as going off air even for a week can damage the business significantly," Shailesh Kapoor, CEO, Ormax, says. Ormax is a media insights company that helps channels gauge audience preferences. According to a BCCC spokesperson, a channel could lose anywhere between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 1 crore in revenues if it is taken off air for a week.

Comedy Central, an American channel, was taken off air for six days in November last year after a few of its shows were found by the government to be "indecent". The Delhi High Court upheld the government's decision.

But it is the audience that channels fear the most. The BCCC alone gets around 7,000 complaints a year from across the country. And they can be on anything. For instance, Latin Angels on Fox Life didn't go down well with somebody who watched it at 2am. The complainant wrote about a model wearing a "strappy" bikini which "hardly covered her body."

The complainant wrote to the BCCC: "The model is seen posing for a highly sensational photo-shoot with the camera angles well designed to focus on her breasts and buttocks. Such indecent presentation of a woman's body is denigrating to women." The BCCC viewed the content and ruled in favour of the channel as it was not shown during "normal" hours.

The moral police can complain about anything - even a stray scene of animals mating in wildlife programmes. "Two animals were shown performing sex. It [the scene] came without warning and was embarrassing to watch with (sic) family," a complainant noted. The BCCC disposed of the complaint.

According to the BCCC, it goes by the guidelines set by the Indian Broadcasters' Federation (IBF), a body of Indian broadcasters. The IBF guidelines are against showing nudity, disrespect for the Indian flags, anti-religious sentiments and other transgressions.

"We generally follow the programme code of the ministry of information and broadcasting. And staying within that, we also take consumer complaints seriously," a BCCC spokesperson says. The BCCC can impose fines up to Rs 10 lakh on a channel if it finds the content inappropriate.

Complaints of alleged violations have been rising in recent years. The BCCC says it received 2,203 specific complaints against GECs in almost three years, from June 2011 to April 2014. It got 1,853 specific complaints in a year from April 2014 to March 2015. "Fringe sections of society and often politicians raise issues on TV content to get quick publicity," Kapoor says.

Indeed, in some quarters, there are people who are keeping a sharp eye on television content. Akhilesh Tiwari, the president of the Brahman Ekta Seva Sanstha, who led protests against the AIB in Mumbai, says that he is collecting evidence of "violations against Indian culture" on television and will organise a protest soon.

But industry insiders say that it's not just the fringe elements who complain. "Everybody who watches TV is a potential complainant. It has also become easy to complain because of access to email addresses of channels and even organisations such as the BCCC. If somebody doesn't like something, they shoot out a mail," the S&P head of a GEC says.

BCCC and channels admit that they would rather err on the side of caution than take on the moral brigade. In 2013, BCCC asked Big CBS Love and BIG CBS Spark - joints ventures between Reliance and CBS International Studios - to pay a fine for showing "offensive content" on the channels. The channels no longer operate from India.

Most of the complaints that the BCCC and internal S&Ps receive are for Hindi content. Almost 200 of the 600 channels operating in India are GECs, but of them, English GECs form only a very small part.

Till a few years ago, there was talk of channels being launched exclusively for adults. But now that complaints are coming in about the smallest of matters, the subject seems to have died a sudden death.

"We can say that adult content is not going to happen in India anytime soon," Kapoor says.

As Broacha puts it, India is becoming an "unfair country" for creative people. "But we have to continue to try and push the boundaries," he says. And bleep out the bleeps.