New Delhi: The Indian government’s Department of Telecommunications issued a so-far unpublished order to telecom officials in November, telling them to intercept any data that its agencies could use under Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, ThePrint reported on Wednesday, sources have told AFP. Industry and civil-liberty backlash is already mounting, Dec. 1, 2025 (Read more). The mandate, confirmed by reports citing the confidential order, has been framed to curb cyber fraud and stolen-phone scams.
Those who have seen the order say it applies to all the largest brands — Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo — and makes Sanchar Saathi something akin to an OS-level app, as core a part of this phone as the dialer or settings menu. The directive was detailed in a Reuters report published by the Economic Times, which reported that devices already in factories, warehouses, or stores must receive the app via software updates to ensure it arrives on those gadgets even after purchase.
What Sanchar Saathi actually does
Sanchar Saathi, which began in 2023 as a “citizen-centric” portal of the telecoms ministry, enables people to check how many mobile connections are taken out in their name, disconnect numbers they do not know and block or trace lost handsets through India’s central IMEI database. The service, which is also available via a mobile app and the official Sanchar Saathi website, includes features to check whether a phone’s IMEI is blacklisted and to report suspected fraud calls,, phishing messages, or spam.
When the communications minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, unveiled the Sanchar Saathi portal in May 2023, the government described it as a voluntary tool that would enable mobile users to trace and block stolen phones and check second-hand handsets. The coverage at the time — for example, a Times of India explainer on the launch — portrayed it as a service one could visit if needed. That tone was still prevalent in early 2025, when Business Standard reported on a special Sanchar Saathi mobile app that allowed individuals to flag scam calls in their call logs.
Officials now argue that requiring Sanchar Saathi on devices is a natural culmination of that fraud-turning mission. Government reports and local media accounts have attributed the relationship with CEIR and TAFCOP of Sanchar Saathi for preventing or tracing millions of lost or stolen handsets, and disconnecting tens of millions of suspected fake or duplicate mobile connections in recent months — achievements that the telecom ministry fingers as evidence that embedding Sanchar Saathi further deeper into device ecosystems would serve to choke off cyber-crime on a vast scale.
Phone makers and digital-rights advocates disagree. Apple, which has clashed with India’s telecom regulator over a spam-blocking app, is likely to resist any mandatory installation of an undisturbable government program on its iPhones, and Android vendors worry about the engineering work and customer-support headaches of being mandated to add yet another system component. Here’s Business Standard with the first breakdown of the secret order (manufacturers have 90 days to start complying, and “the rule could be re-examined” after consultations, but only after companies begin adjusting their software).
Privacy activists say the Sanchar Saathi directive is part of a wider pattern of India hard-wiring controls into its digital architecture, pointing to another parallel instruction which gives messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, 90 days to set up how they handle so-called SIM binding that makes accounts unusable when users switch SIM cards. That making an app such as this a standard feature that cannot be deleted from every new phone could normalise the concept of always-on government software, and that any deployment on this scale needs to come with explicit data-protection safeguards, independent audits and a clear route for users to challenge its misuse.
If those protections come to pass, it will shape how Indians experience Sanchar Saathi in the months to come: as a helpful safety net against scams and theft, or as yet another sign of creeping state control over the devices they carry around. For the moment, the clock is ticking for device makers, regulators and rights groups to figure out what living with an undeletable government-safety app on every (new) phone should actually mean.
