Why Govt must scrap Sanchar Saathi app pre-install order

New Delhi: The row over the ‘Sanchar Saathi’ application, which smartphone makers have been asked to mandatorily pre-install on their devices, is not going to end with one “optional” clarification from the government.

At the heart of the controversy is not a toggle button, not a consent screen, but a simple question of power: can the government force a state-owned app into every new smartphone sold in India and then hide behind the language of “consent”?

Also read: Sanchar Saathi app downloads jump 10 times on Tuesday: DoT sources

While the Opposition has called it “snooping” and “mass surveillance”, the government has tried to defend the move by saying the app is optional and consent-driven. That defence deliberately sidesteps the real problem.

The pre-installation mandate must be scrapped, the government must publicly commit to never forcing its apps on citizens’ phones, and Sanchar Saathi, if it is to exist, must operate only as an opt-in tool with strict, independently audited privacy safeguards.

Consent cannot be built on coercion

When an app lands on a device only because the state ordered it, the basic power balance is already distorted. The citizen never got to decide whether that app should be present on the phone in the first place.

Calling such an arrangement “consent-driven” is misleading.

Consent is about free choice. Free choice means the right to say “no” before the app appears on the device at all – not after it sits there with system-level visibility, pre-loaded by diktat, and then asks for permissions.

Put simply, forcing the pre-installation of a government-owned app is a violation of the fundamental right to privacy, and no justification for it can be accepted.

If the government genuinely believes that Sanchar Saathi can protect citizens from cyber fraud, it should stand behind the product in the open market and campaign for voluntary downloads. 

It must run awareness drives, explain the benefits, and let people install it from app stores of their own will. What it must not do is use its regulatory power over handset makers to shove an app into every citizen’s pocket.

DPDP on one side, privacy violations on the other

On one hand, the same government has passed the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act and claimed it has built strong guardrails around data use and privacy. On the other hand, by mandating a pre-installed state app, it is eroding those very guardrails through executive orders.

You cannot celebrate the right to privacy in Parliament and then undermine it in practice through backdoor mandates. 

This is exactly the kind of behaviour that makes citizens distrust digital governance and data-protection promises.

The government did not need forced pre-installs before. Why now?

There is also a basic question of consistency that the government has not answered.

For years, governments across the world have pushed their digital projects and apps without demanding that phone makers pre-install them. Whether it was payments, identity-linked services, Covid-era health apps or citizen-service platforms. 

At no point did the state tell handset manufacturers: “You must ship every new phone with our app already sitting on it.”

If cyber fraud prevention is the justification today, the government’s own track record proves that it can achieve scale and adoption through awareness, incentives and service design, not device-level force.

So what has changed now? Why does this one app, Sanchar Saathi, suddenly need the crutch of a pre-installation mandate when no other government app did?

A design that invites misuse by officials and vendors

There is another serious concern that the government’s “optional” line simply refuses to acknowledge. The high probability of misuse by officials, telcos and vendors who stand between the citizen and the system.

Even if the app, on paper, claims limited data collection and strong safeguards, the moment it is pre-installed by order, it becomes a tool that can be abused in everyday interactions.

A police officer, a local official, a telco employee or an outsourced call-centre agent can simply say, “This is a government app, you must keep it,” and most citizens will comply. 

Many will not know they ever had a right to decline or uninstall it. Some will be pressured to share OTPs, IDs, screenshots or additional details in the name of “verification” or “fraud prevention”. That is how soft coercion operates in the real world.

The more institutional legitimacy and visibility the app gets by being pre-installed, the more attractive it becomes for anyone looking to misuse data or build a parallel information economy.

If the government is serious about trust, it must answer some basic questions clearly and in public:

1. Who exactly will have access to the data collected through Sanchar Saathi, and at what level of detail?
2. What logging and audit systems will record every access by an official, vendor or intermediary?
3. What are the real deletion timelines and what penalties will apply in practice for misuse, not just on paper?
4. Will citizens have independent, effective grievance redressal if the app is misused against them?

In a country with deep power imbalances and weak accountability, the architecture of a pre-installed government-mandated app makes the fear of misuse fully rational.

Echo chambers inside government

This episode also exposes how government departments operate in echo chambers. If the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had meaningfully consulted the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the ministry that is supposed to think about data protection and digital rights, this idea of mandatory pre-installation should never have cleared the first internal discussion.

The result is a decision that looks neat in a PowerPoint presentation but is tone-deaf, legally shaky and politically costly.

Officials misled, but the minister is responsible

There is little doubt that officials would have sold Sanchar Saathi to the minister as a “citizen-centric” fraud-prevention tool, while burying the privacy and misuse risks under technical assurances.

But ministers are not meant to sign whatever the file proposes. They are supposed to ask the questions the bureaucracy avoids.

In this case, Jyotiraditya Scindia has not only been badly advised; he has also failed in political and constitutional judgment. Faced with a proposal that combined a government app, a mandate, and a fundamental right to privacy, he chose not to veto it.

A powerful minister believes he can do anything with regulatory power first and manage the fallout later through spin and “clarification”. That is exactly how avoidable embarrassments are created for the Modi government, which wants to claim both digital leadership and respect for citizens’ rights.

There is, however, a clear and actionable way out.

The government must do three things:

1. Immediately scrap the pre-installation mandate for Sanchar Saathi.
2. Publicly commit that no government app will ever be forced onto citizens’ devices through licensing or regulatory conditions.
3. Redesign Sanchar Saathi as a purely voluntary, opt-in tool with independently audited privacy safeguards, full transparency on data flows and a robust, accessible grievance mechanism for misuse.