Monitoring Desk: On a winter morning in December 2025, India quietly crossed a digital Rubicon. Without parliamentary debate or meaningful public consultation, New Delhi ordered all smartphones sold in the country to come pre-loaded with a government-run cybersecurity application—software that users would not be able to disable, restrict, or remove.
Weeks later, in January 2026, the government went a step further, proposing rules that would compel smartphone manufacturers to hand over source code and alert authorities to major software updates.
Taken together, these two measures represent far more than regulatory tinkering in the name of cybersecurity. They mark a profound transformation of India’s digital ecosystem—one that turns the world’s second-largest smartphone market, with an estimated 750 million active devices, into a potential mass-surveillance infrastructure. For a country that still claims the mantle of the “world’s largest democracy,” the implications are stark.
The Sanchar Saathi Mandate: A Trojan in the Pocket
At the centre of this shift is the Sanchar Saathi app. Under the December directive, manufacturers were given 90 days to ensure that the app is pre-installed on every smartphone sold in India. The order is explicit: the app’s functions “cannot be disabled or restricted” and must be “readily visible and accessible” during device setup.
What does this app do? According to its own privacy policy, Sanchar Saathi is authorised to make and manage phone calls, send messages, access call and message logs, view photos and files, and use the camera. In effect, it requests permissions that span nearly every aspect of a user’s digital life.
Civil liberties groups have not minced words. The Internet Freedom Foundation warned that the mandate converts smartphones into “vessels for state-mandated software that the user cannot meaningfully refuse, control, or remove.” In democratic societies, consent is the cornerstone of data collection. Here, consent is rendered irrelevant by design.
Cybersecurity—or Convenient Pretext?
The government insists the app is a benign tool to combat fraud and theft. Officials point to the recovery of some 700,000 lost or stolen phones through Sanchar Saathi, including 50,000 in a single month, and its role in identifying duplicate IMEI numbers in India’s sprawling second-hand device market.
Yet this justification collapses under scrutiny. Verifying a phone’s authenticity or reporting it stolen does not require access to personal messages, photos, or a live camera. As digital rights advocates have noted, the app seeks permissions “to just about everything from flashlight to camera”—a scope wildly disproportionate to its stated purpose.
Cybersecurity, in this context, begins to look less like a shield and more like a fig leaf.
Source Code Surrender: An Unprecedented Demand
If mandatory spyware were not enough, the January 2026 proposal raised the stakes further. Smartphone makers would be required to share source code with the Indian government, comply with 83 new security standards, and notify authorities of major software updates.
Industry insiders confirm that these requirements have no precedent in any established democracy. Source code is the crown jewel of technology companies, embodying years of research, intellectual property, and competitive advantage. Forcing its disclosure to the state is not routine regulation; it is coercive overreach.
Unsurprisingly, global giants such as Apple and Samsung are reported to be resisting these demands behind the scenes. Their concern is not merely commercial. India has a documented history of data mishandling and politically motivated surveillance, raising fears that proprietary technology—and user data—could be misused with little accountability.
Authoritarian Parallels, Not Democratic Norms
Supporters of the policy have tried to portray India as an outlier innovating in digital security. In reality, the country is joining a far less flattering club. As digital rights expert Roy has observed, only China and Russia require smartphones to come pre-installed with government software before sale. Russia issued such an order in August 2024; China’s comprehensive surveillance architecture is already infamous.
By combining mandatory, non-removable state software with demands for source code disclosure, India is creating a surveillance regime that rivals—and in some respects exceeds—those of openly authoritarian states. The comparison is unavoidable and deeply unsettling.
A Pattern of Digital Repression
These measures did not emerge in a vacuum. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has steadily eroded digital freedoms. The country leads the world in internet shutdowns, with more than 600 since 2012. Social media platforms face mounting pressure to censor content, hand over user data, or risk punitive action. Journalists, activists, and opposition figures have repeatedly alleged electronic surveillance and harassment.
The smartphone mandates feel less like an aberration and more like the culmination of this trajectory: the consolidation of an intrusive security state that seeks visibility into every digital interaction of its citizens.
Democracy in Name, Totalitarianism in Practice?
Government officials insist that the measures are voluntary and security-enhancing. But an app that cannot be disabled is not voluntary by any reasonable definition. Demands for source code with no global democratic precedent are not security standards; they are a form of intellectual property expropriation dressed up as regulation.
If such policies were proposed in Western democracies, they would trigger immediate legal challenges, corporate withdrawal, and diplomatic backlash. In India, they have been introduced with barely a ripple of public debate.
For 1.2 billion mobile users, the message is clear: privacy is no longer a right but a privilege, revocable at the state’s discretion. The smartphone—once a symbol of empowerment and connectivity—now risks becoming an instrument of constant oversight.
George Orwell imagined a world where the state watched its citizens through omnipresent screens. In Modi’s India, that screen may already be in your pocket.
