India’s Sanchar Saathi episode has become a textbook case of how even well‑intentioned digital safety initiatives can fail when they are rolled out as top‑down diktats rather than co‑created infrastructure. The government has now fully withdrawn the order that required every new smartphone to ship with a non‑removable Sanchar Saathi app, returning the tool to a voluntary model after just a few days of public, political, and industry backlash.​

From flagship safety tool to policy U‑turn

Sanchar Saathi itself is not new: it is a DoT platform that lets users check IMEI authenticity, see all SIMs in their name, report lost/stolen phones, and flag suspicious telecom activity; over 1.4 crore users have downloaded it and it has helped recover more than 7 lakh handsets, including over 50,000 in October 2025 alone. In late November, however, DoT issued a confidential order directing all manufacturers and importers to pre‑install the app on every smartphone “intended for use in India” and ensure that its functionalities were “not disabled or restricted,” effectively making it a permanent state client on each device.​

The directive was justified in the name of escalating cyber‑fraud and device theft, but it landed like a surveillance shock: opposition parties called it a snooping move, digital‑rights groups warned of mission creep, and global OEMs such as Apple and Google reportedly began exploring pushback, including legal options. Within 48 hours, the government first said the app was optional and deletable, and then went further—formally revoking the pre‑installation mandate altogether while continuing to promote voluntary adoption.​

Why diktats backfire in India’s digital ecosystem

Three structural factors explain why this kind of unilateral order rarely survives in India:

• Multi‑stakeholder complexity. India’s smartphone stack is powered by global OS vendors, multinational OEMs, domestic manufacturers, and a huge app ecosystem; a mandatory, non‑removable government app cuts against the platform security models of Apple and Google and directly affects user experience and liability. Without prior consultation, the order created a coalition of resistance—from Big Tech to civil society to opposition parties—which quickly became politically too costly to ignore.​
• Constitutional and political sensitivity to surveillance. Since the Aadhaar, Pegasus, and data‑protection debates, any perception of mass, opaque state access to devices or data triggers immediate scrutiny in courts, Parliament, and media. Even though the government insisted “snooping is neither feasible nor will it occur,” the combination of a non‑removable app and broad cybersecurity powers was enough to erode trust faster than official clarifications could restore it.​
• India’s tradition of negotiated regulation. Whether on telecom tariffs, content rules, or fintech KYC, Indian regulators frequently announce strong positions and then refine them through consultations, court challenges, and industry feedback. The Sanchar Saathi climb‑down fits this pattern: stakeholders pushed back, the ministry stressed rising voluntary downloads (over 6 lakhs in a single day), and the formal order was quietly scrapped.​​

In short, diktats collide with the reality that India’s digital public sphere is noisy, litigious, and plural: any policy that touches everyday devices and rights must survive not just in government files, but in courts, global boardrooms, and public opinion.

How such initiatives should be launched instead

The Sanchar Saathi rollback illustrates the cost of treating a safety app like a compliance obligation rather than a public‑good platform:

• A consultative design process with handset makers, OS providers, banking and fintech players, and rights groups would likely have surfaced implementation options—app store promotion, OEM‑bundled but removable installs, integration via APIs—without hard‑coding a non‑removable client.​
• Clear legal basis and purpose limitation—explicitly tying the app to theft and telecom‑fraud use cases, with independent audits and transparency reports—could have pre‑empted fears that today’s anti‑fraud layer might become tomorrow’s content‑control or profiling tool.​
• Finally, aligning incentives instead of imposing obligations—allowing OEMs to showcase security benefits, insurers to link to lower risk, and banks or wallets to integrate flows—would build organic adoption on top of already strong usage numbers, rather than relying on coercion.​

India’s own successes with UPI, FASTag, DigiLocker, and CoWIN show that when digital public goods are built with open standards, clear governance, and visible utility, adoption soars without force.

India vs China: same tools, different politics

Sanchar Saathi is often compared to Chinese digital‑control models, but the underlying policy logics and constraints differ in important ways:

• Real‑name and app mandates. China has long required real‑name registration for SIM cards and, since 2016, has demanded that mobile app providers verify user identities and keep detailed activity logs, with enforcement driven by central agencies and limited space for public challenge. These requirements sit within a broader governance model where the state openly prioritises social stability and information control over individual privacy.​
• India’s contested, rights‑based framework. India also uses real‑name KYC for SIMs and is tightening telecom cybersecurity but operates under a constitutional right to privacy and a politically competitive environment where opposition parties, courts, and civil‑society organisations can—and do—contest over‑broad measures. The fact that a single pre‑installation order triggered media storms, parliamentary questions, threatened OEM resistance and was then rolled back within days is itself evidence of these countervailing forces.​
• Direction of travel. China’s trajectory has been consistently toward deeper integration of identity, social credit, and digital platforms under state oversight, with limited transparency. India, by contrast, is experimenting with strong digital rails (Aadhaar, UPI, now Sanchar Saathi) but is being forced, case by case, to negotiate privacy, proportionality, and federal politics—often via noisy course corrections like this rollback.​

So, while tools like Sanchar Saathi can resemble Chinese mechanisms in their technical ambition—linking devices, SIMs, and identity—the policy environment is fundamentally different: India’s democracy, courts, and globalised tech ecosystem impose real constraints that make durable “diktats” difficult to sustain.

Where this leaves Sanchar Saathi now

With the mandate revoked, Sanchar Saathi reverts to what it arguably should have been all along: a high‑impact, voluntary safety utility that competes on trust and usefulness, not compulsion. The app’s strong recovery numbers and rising organic downloads show that the underlying idea—giving every mobile user an easy way to verify devices, audit SIMs, and report fraud—is sound; the setback lies in how the state tried to force ubiquity instead of earning it.​

The big lesson for future digital policy in India is straightforward: start with clear problem definition and evidence (cyber‑fraud, stolen devices), design open, auditable tools, involve those who must implement them, and assume public contestation as a feature, not a bug. When that process is honoured, India can build rails that are both secure and rights‑respecting—without having to issue a diktat today and withdraw it tomorrow.