Amid snooping row, govt revokes order to pre-install Sanchar Saathi on phones

The Centre on Wednesday reversed its controversial order mandating smartphone makers to pre-install the Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity app on every smartphone sold in the country. The move follows a fierce political backlash, sharp privacy warnings from citizens and a sudden surge in voluntary app downloads that the government is now using to justify the U-turn.

What began as a cybersecurity initiative spiralled into a national debate on digital freedom, triggering questions over transparency, intent and the boundaries of state power in the digital age.

In its withdrawal notice, the Department of Telecom (DoT) said it no longer needed to enforce the mandate because the app witnessed an “unprecedented spike” in organic adoption. Officials said more than six lakh people downloaded the app and registered on it in the last 24 hours, indicating a 10-fold jump. This, they claimed, indicated that citizens were ready to use the app without compulsion.

The original directive issued on November 28 had ordered smartphone manufacturers to pre-install Sanchar Saathi on all new devices and roll it out to old phones through updates. The plan immediately set off alarms, with critics warning that such a blanket rule could turn into a “backdoor for surveillance”. Apple and Samsung indicated that they might not comply with the directive. Opposition parties, activists and citizens questioned why a security app should be embedded permanently into phones when users had not asked for it.

Seeking to calm the uproar, the government insisted there was “no possibility” of snooping through the app. Union Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia told Parliament that Sanchar Saathi was only meant to protect users from fraud, track missing devices and facilitate reporting of suspicious cyber activity. He said the ministry was open to altering its instructions based on feedback and emphasised that users were free to remove the app at any time.

DoT officials further claimed the app did not have access to contacts, messages, call records, location or any sensitive data unless explicitly permitted. So far, they said, 1.4 crore people have downloaded the app and contributed information on around 2,000 cyberfraud cases daily.

The Congress, meanwhile, refused to buy the government’s defence and accused the BJP of attempting “surveillance by coercion”. At a press conference, party spokesperson Pawan Khera alleged the government had been “caught intruding into citizens’ digital lives” and was now trying to “paper over an intrusive and unconstitutional diktat.”

He said the minister’s assurance that the app could be deleted was contradicted by the government’s own written order, which, according to him, clearly stated that a pre-installed version could not be removed or disabled. Khera described the clarification “a convenient falsehood meant to mask a disturbing overreach,” arguing that a state that misrepresented its own directives could not be trusted with citizens’ personal data.

He accused the government of “normalising mass surveillance,” warning that embedding a permanent, non-removable app would allow access to intimate conversations, browsing habits, and device metadata. Drawing parallels with past cases where digital evidence was allegedly planted on activists’ devices, he questioned why the state felt entitled to decide on behalf of millions without consultation or consent.

Khera said the directive amounted to “the state entering bedrooms and private conversations,” and asked how such intrusion squared with the Prime Minister’s claim of “minimum government”. He said the rollback was evidence the government had been “found prying and now pretends innocence”.