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.