Hearing a petition seeking restoration of a doctor’s blocked WhatsApp Messenger account, a Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta recently advised her, “There’s this indigenous app called Arattai…use that. Make In India!” These judicial remarks, seemingly casual, reflect a deeper concern about India’s digital sovereignty. “Arattai,” Tamil for “conversation,” is a Made-in-India messaging app hosted on Indian servers. It gained popularity following endorsements from senior Cabinet Ministers and has now crossed one crore downloads.

For over a decade since the era of chargeable Short Message Service (SMS), global platforms have monopolised our private conversations, expanding from text to multimedia messages and even video calls, all for free; Some say there is no free lunch. Foreign-hosted apps pose a critical legal issue for Indian users, public servants in particular. When they communicate through these servers, they may risk violating the Public Records Act, 1993. Section 4 explicitly prohibits “taking out of India any public records of the Government,” including digital records. Section 9 even prescribes imprisonment of up to five years for such violations. Few have been charged, and the practice remains widespread.

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The National Informatics Centre (NIC) launched Sandes as an indigenous alternative, but it has not gained much traction among the general public. At the heart of modern messaging is End-to-End Encryption (E2EE), which ensures a message is encrypted on the sender’s device and decrypted only by the recipient, protecting data both in transit and at rest. WhatsApp (about 3 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs)), Apple’s iMessage (1 billion MAUs) and Signal (70 million MAUs) apply E2EE by default.

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