Sanchar Saathi: DoT order to phone makers to ‘pre-install’ app gets significant pushback

The government’s mandate on Monday (December 1, 2025) for smartphone makers to pre-install the Sanchar Saathi app sparked backlash from the Opposition and from digital rights activists. Congress leader K.C. Venugopal called the directions “beyond constitutional,” characterising the app as a “dystopian tool to monitor every Indian”.

Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi from the Shiv Sena (UBT) said that “Sanchar Saathi mobile application mandate to every mobile phone manufacturer as a permanent mobile feature by the GoI is nothing but another BIG BOSS surveillance moment.”

Sanchar Saathi is an app that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) launched initially as a website in 2023 to allow users to flag fraudulent phone calls. The app also integrates other tools the DoT has launched in the past, such as a feature to check the “genuineness” of the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number assigned to a device, and to block a stolen phone by barring telecom operators from working on a blacklisted IMEI.

Mandating the app to be installed, as the DoT did in an order to phone makers on Monday (December 1, 2025), would likely mean that users wouldn’t be able to uninstall it, as is the case for private apps pre-installed on many smartphone brands’ devices. The DoT did not officially announce the move until after news reports came out describing the move. 

Some worried about the potential for a pre-installed app like this to be used as a carrier for malware and spyware. Anand Venkatanarayanan, co-founder of DeepStrat, a policy and cybersecurity consultancy, said on X that a “Regulator as a Malware operator is quite a thing in India,” as “[o]nce you get root in OS layer by a govt app, an Over the air update is all it takes to “get more permissions”.” Root access refers to privileged access in an operating system, which pre-installed apps usually have; such access allows apps to add to what they have access to without prompting users to accept additional permissions.

Last week, the DoT ordered WhatsApp and other platforms like it to restrict users to devices containing the SIM card they used to register. That order also ordered WhatsApp web and similar secondary access mechanisms to be logged out every six hours. Both directions were issued under the Telecom Cyber Security Rules, 2024, which were amended in November to allow the DoT to target a wide range of firms which use mobile numbers to identify users, going beyond its usual remit of telecom operators.