The Indian government changed its mind last Wednesday.

The telecom ministry withdrew its order requiring phonemakers to pre-install Sanchar Saathi, a state-run cybersecurity app, on every new mobile device sold in India. The plan lasted barely a week. It’s surveillance-by-default, said the Opposition; civil-liberties groups said it bulldozed consent, and handset makers—who would be the ones actually forced to do the bulldozing—looked like they would rather not.

So the Centre stepped back.

But the entire episode has proved instructive because it sits at the intersection of two India-scale truths.

First, India has digitised at a breathtaking pace over the past decade through digital infrastructure, including connectivity, identity, payments, and data sharing. Policy and regulatory support, domestic tech talent, and a vast consumer base have led to lasting economic, commercial, and social benefits, including greater inclusivity, transparency, and affordability of formal financial services, particularly banking and payments.

The most visible symbols of this success are the ubiquitous QR codes, waved at you by rickshaw drivers, flower sellers, delivery agents, and so on. Removing friction from everyday life is a good thing.

Second, the government would very much like this infrastructure to be safe. After all, it had allocated Rs 782 crore in Union Budget 2025–26 for cybersecurity.

But the problem is that the moment it tries to bolt a security measure onto millions of devices by force, everyone remembers that they like privacy, too. 

Reuters reported last week that India is also weighing deeper phone-location tracking powers—proposals Apple, Google, and Samsung have already opposed. In other words, Sanchar Saathi wasn’t an isolated misstep; it was an early skirmish in a larger battle.

And the backdrop is unavoidable. 

One particularly Indian innovation is the social-engineering fraud called “digital arrest”. 

For those of you outside India, this involves authentic-looking fraudsters impersonating law-enforcement officials entrapping gullible victims over video calls, and extracting vast sums of money to escape penalties for fictitious offences “detected in their name”.

If you pare it down, it works on a few basics:

Conditioning

Crime-based television shows—Crime Patrol being the category-defining example—have enjoyed massive viewership for over a decade. Parrot Analytics data shows Crime Patrol Dial at 12X the demand of an average Indian series in the past month, indicating extraordinary sustained interest.