India: IT and Internet

India's semiconductor ambitions are gaining global attention as the country moves beyond fabrication facilities to build an integrated ecosystem spanning raw materials, equipment manufacturing, chip design, and advanced packaging. With strategic partnerships already underway and a target to produce 3nm semiconductors by 2032, India faces the challenge of reducing its 90% import dependence while developing domestic capabilities across the entire value chain.

Cybersecurity regulation in India has, until now, largely spoken to the entity that suffers the breach. The 2022 CERT-In Directions issued under Section 70B of the Information Technology Act, 2000 fixed a six-hour reporting clock on the organisation that detects an incident. The new Guidelines flip the lens onto the entity upstream of that breach, the OEM or technology provider that built the product in the first place. For the first time, vendors supplying software, firmware, cloud platforms, or APIs into India carry direct, time-bound, and independently verifiable obligations of their own and not obligations that are merely passed through a customer contract, but obligations CERT-In itself may enforce.

Across India, educational institutions and businesses that deal with minors have made it a routine practice to photograph children celebrating achievements, post their names and images on social media, websites, and marketing material, share performance data with third parties, and collect biometric or health-related data — all without obtaining verifiable parental consent. These photographs and videos are posted without the child or parent having any meaningful opportunity to review, restrict, or object.

On 31 July 1995, India heard its first mobile ring, when the then Union Minister of Communications spoke from Delhi to the then Chief Minister of West Bengal in Kolkata. For most of the two decades that followed, India consumed mobile phones without making them. In 2014, the country had only two mobile phone manufacturing units and was approximately 78% import dependent, with roughly 75% of domestic demand in 2014-15 being met through imports. Today, India has over 300 mobile manufacturing units and imports account for about 0.02% of domestic demand.

On May 29, 2026, the Delhi High Court delivered a landmark judgment in a batch of petitions that raised the same question, that stood at the intersection of constitutional law and the digital age viz. whether an individual whose name appears in judicial records that are accessible through internet search engines is entitled, by virtue of the right to informational privacy guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution, to seek de-indexing of those records from name-based search results and masking of personal identifiers (including names) from publicly accessible digital versions of those records.

In March 2026, in California, a Los Angeles jury in the case of K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., found Meta and Google liable for a young woman’s depression and suicidal thoughts after she claimed that she became addictive to social media platforms at 9-years. The jury found Meta Platforms and Google liable for the depression, anxiety, body image disorders, and suicidal ideation suffered by a young woman who had become addicted to Instagram and YouTube from the age of nine. The jury awarded USD 3 million in damages, Meta bearing 70% of responsibility, Google the remaining 30%.[1]

A sexual harassment and workplace coercion case at a prominent multinational information technology office in Nashik has sent shockwaves through India’s IT sector. What began as individual complaints has now escalated into a multi agency investigation involving multiple FIRs, arrests, suspensions, and a high level internal probe. At the heart of it all lies a critical question: did the system designed to protect employees actually work?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept. It is already shaping how businesses operate, how consumers interact online, and even how important decisions are made. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in everyday life, concerns around accountability, transparency, fairness and bias have become harder to ignore.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on 16 June 2026 issued two directions related to the Telegram messaging platform under the recommendations of the National Testing Agency (NTA).