When our democracy shares tech policy with Russia and China, that should terrify us

With the Sanchar Saathi mandate, India joins a very exclusive club of governments that force undeletable apps onto citizens’ phones. And it’s not the kind of club you brag about joining.

As privacy concerns surged, Union minister for communications Jyotiraditya Scindia attempted damage control, insisting that while the app must be pre-loaded, it can still be removed by users. “It will stay dormant,” he told the media at the parliament building.

But his claim sits squarely at odds with point 7(b) of the government’s directive to smartphone manufacturers: “Ensure that the pre-installed Sanchar Saathi application is readily visible and accessible to the end users at the time of first use or device setup and that its functionalities are not disabled or restricted.”

Under the Telecom Cyber Security rules, manufacturers have been directed to preinstall the app on new devices sold from March 2026. A compliance report of the same should be submitted to the department within 120 days. 

As per the DoT order, the move is aimed at “safeguarding citizens from buying non-genuine handsets, enabling easy reporting of suspected misuse of telecom resources and increasing effectiveness of the Sanchar Saathi initiative.”

Only a handful of countries have tried anything similar.

Russia directed that from 2025, all new phones must ship with MAX, a state-backed messaging and services app. A Kremlin-approved WhatsApp clone with surveillance concerns baked right in. This was apart from the government’s list of 40 other mandatory apps cleared in 2024.

In China, the Jingwang Weishi app was forced onto Xinjiang residents’ phones for keyword scanning, content control and movement tracking in 2017. Police reportedly enforced app installation through spot checks, and refusal could result in detention or arrest. 

In 2022, North Korea mandated smartphone users to install an app to use the isolated country’s closed intranet. The Kwangmyong app connects users to a corner of the intranet where they can access their subscription to the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper and other educational and informational services.

In 2015, South Korea mandated the installation of content blocking apps for minors. But this was rolled back after privacy and security concerns exploded.

That’s it. These are the only comparable examples. And except for South Korea’s now-abandoned experiment, all of them fall clearly into the authoritarian or surveillance-heavy category. So which bucket does India fall into now?

Let’s just say: “One of the world’s largest democracies” should not be appearing in the same sentence as “Russia and China’s phone surveillance mandates”.

The Internet Freedom Foundation noted that the order invokes “telecom cyber security” as a catch all justification, but it does not define the functional perimeter of the app. 

“Clause 5 of the directions refers to identifying acts that ‘endanger telecom cyber security,’ an expression so vague that it invites function creep as a design feature, not a bug. Today, the app may be framed as a benign IMEI checker. Tomorrow, through a server side update, it could be repurposed for client side scanning for ‘banned’ applications, flag VPN usage, correlate SIM activity, or trawl SMS logs in the name of fraud detection. Nothing in the order constrains these possibilities,” it said in a statement. 

“In effect, the state is asking every smartphone user in India to accept an open ended, updatable surveillance capability on their primary personal device, and to do so without the basic guardrails that a constitutional democracy should insist on as a matter of course. IFF is deeply concerned with this direction that sets up a precedent to enforce client side scanning on all smartphones in India and calls for its recall.”

According to cyber expert Anand V, the app requires a list of permissions, including reading and sending SMSs, accessing call logs, view phone and network status, etc.

A lawyer specialising in internet freedoms told Reuters that the Union government is effectively removing user consent as a meaningful choice.  

Nikhil Pahwa, founder-editor of MediaNama, said in a statement that while Sanchar Saathi is essentially a lost phone tracker, as the app cannot be deleted, it becomes a government tracker. He added that the forceful embedding of Sanchar Saathi is a clear invasion of an individual's right to privacy. He argued that the Data Protection Law has made private companies more accountable and the Indian government less accountable. 

Mandatory, undeletable apps cross one of the most basic boundaries of a free society: the right to control your own device. 

Your phone is essentially your second brain – your movements, contacts, habits, photos, messages, political affiliations, health issues, everything lives there. When the state says: “We’ll now install something on it that you cannot remove,” that’s not digital policy. That’s a statement of power.

Why this is especially worrisome for India is because there is no transparency about what the app collects. Sanchar Saathi tracks IMEIs, blocks phones, monitors duplications – powerful functions with little public oversight. Then there is the issue of zero consent. Even Aadhaar and Aarogya Setu weren’t undeletable by law. Moreover, today it’s “anti-fraud”. Tomorrow it can be “national security”. After that, “public order”.

No mature democracy mandates a permanent government app on every phone. Even during Covid, Europe refused to enforce such an app. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia mandated the installment of the Tawakkalna app for those who wanted to access public spaces. Even that was not undeletable though. 

So now if one app becomes compulsory, what stops the next home ministry, next government, next ideology, from deciding your phone should also carry theirs too?

A democracy’s health often shows up first in the details. And a mandatory government app on your private phone is more than a detail. It is a line no democracy should cross.

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