NEW DELHI: Children cannot be forced to choose between their safety and their freedom to access the internet, the Supreme Court has declared, recognising internet access as a fundamental right that belongs to children no less than to adults.
In a significant order passed on October 15, a Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran warned that blanket restrictions on children's online activity could expose them to greater danger rather than shielding them from sexual exploitation and abuse.
The ruling came while the court was hearing applications filed by the child rights organisation 'Just Rights for Children Alliance' and another applicant, who alleged that social media platforms were failing to meet their legal obligations to report child sexual exploitation and abuse material — known as CSEAM — to Indian authorities.
The applicants had sought uniform reporting procedures across platforms, a centralised complaint portal, and action against intermediaries that do not comply with the law.
Addressing those concerns head-on, the Bench issued a sweeping set of directions aimed at detecting and removing abusive material from the internet, even as it firmly refused to endorse the idea that children should be kept offline altogether.
"We have no hesitation in saying that the right to access and use the internet is a fundamental right of every individual under Article 21, read with Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution," the court said, referring to the constitutional guarantees of protection of life and personal liberty and freedom of speech and expression.
"Our children, irrespective of their age, enjoy the same rights, and to deny the same altogether would be as absurd as saying children below a certain age do not have a conscience worth protecting or a freedom of speech worth expressing. The safety of our children and their freedom are not at odds with each other. Our children are entitled to both," the Bench added.
The order marks an important evolution in the court's thinking on digital rights.
In its January 10, 2020 judgment in Anuradha Bhasin versus Union of India, the Supreme Court had held that the freedom of speech and expression and the freedom to carry on trade or business through the internet are constitutionally protected as fundamental rights under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g), but it had refrained from deciding whether the right to access the internet is, by itself, a fundamental right — leaving that question open for future consideration.
That question has now been answered. The Bench noted that in its April 2025 decision in Pragya Prasun versus Union of India, the court had already held that the "right to digital access is an intrinsic component of the right to life under Article 21" and that it is the state's obligation to "proactively design and implement inclusive digital ecosystems" serving not only the privileged but also the marginalised and historically excluded.
The present order, the court said, means the issue is no longer untouched law.
At the heart of the ruling is a practical argument about how children actually behave online. The Bench cautioned that prohibiting children from accessing the internet would not necessarily stop them from using it. Children barred by law, the court observed, tend to continue secretly, migrate to less regulated platforms, and encounter risks that parents and authorities find harder to monitor.
Worse, the court said, restrictions could discourage children who face grooming, threats or manipulation from reporting abuse to parents, guardians or trusted adults, because they fear being punished for having used the internet in the first place.
Such a chilling effect, the Bench noted, would "significantly undermine the safety of our children, who are already apprehensive about confiding such incidents, even without such restrictions, and defeat the avowed object of the POCSO Act," the law enacted to protect children from sexual offences.
Describing blanket restrictions as "unproven measures of proven disproportionality", the court said their effectiveness in making children safer had never been demonstrated, and that bans could not substitute for earnest efforts by technology companies, law enforcement agencies and the government to detect and remove abusive material.
The Bench was unsparing about where responsibility truly lies. As far as CSEAM is concerned, it said, "the wrongdoer is the person who creates, circulates, sells or seeks out such material, and the intermediary which fails to detect and remove the same. To keep the child away from the internet on account of such failures would be to mistake the victim for the problem."
The court also flagged a deeper constitutional concern with age-based bans: enforcing them would require identifying and ascertaining the age of every single user, continuous collection and monitoring of sensitive personal data, and an overall disproportionate risk of misuse and surveillance — "the kind which finds no place within the right to privacy of our people."
That does not mean the court ruled out all restrictions. It clarified that the government remains free to restrict children's access to specific categories of content or services that are inherently harmful, including adult-content websites. Targeted, proportionate restraints, the Bench said, are different from a blanket denial of access.
Instead of prohibition, the court proposed a framework of safeguards built around parental consent, guidance and supervision, along with a dedicated "child mode" for children's social media accounts. Such accounts, the Bench suggested, could be private by default, with restrictions on contact and messages from unknown adults, and moderation of the advertisements and content accessible to children.
For pre-teens, it suggested proportionate mechanisms for verifying parental consent, leaving the precise arrangements to the Centre to work out.
The order also tackles the machinery of detection. The court directed the Union government to create a National Hash and URL List Database exclusively for detecting and removing CSEAM.
A hash is a digital fingerprint that can identify a particular file, while a URL identifies an internet address; a shared database would let platforms check content against material already confirmed to be abusive, rather than relying only on individual complaints or lists maintained separately by each company.
The database could be built within the government's existing Sahyog Portal — which currently routes individual complaints and takedown notices — or created as a standalone repository. The court noted that the Sahyog Portal does not presently function as a shared database enabling automatic cross-platform identification and removal of matching abusive material.
Crucially, the Bench built in protections against misuse of the database itself. Each entry must pass multiple levels of verification, with the final assessment carried out independently by at least three trained human analysts. The database must contain only the relevant hashes and URLs — never the abusive material itself — and must be backed by record-keeping, audit mechanisms and an effective grievance-redressal process for cases of wrongful identification and removal.
The court stressed that the database and similar tools may be used only to detect and remove CSEAM, and for no other purpose.
The Bench further directed the Centre to frame comprehensive guidelines and standard operating procedures for perceptual hash-matching, URL listing and other technological measures, and to amend the Information Technology Rules where necessary. It asked the government to report on the tools intermediaries currently deploy for detecting and removing CSEAM, and said it would like to hear arguments on the feasibility of industry-wide deployment of such tools.
The order also addressed the scrutiny of paywalled and subscription-based content, the reporting obligations of intermediaries, digital-safety awareness, and support for victims, including access to counselling and psychological assistance.
The ruling dwells at length on the realities of children's digital lives. For many children, particularly in remote areas, the court noted, the internet is often the only source of learning and information; for children with special needs, it is often the only place where they can find company among others like them.
Awareness, the court said, must be part of the answer: children need to be taught to recognise inappropriate requests and advances, to respect their own dignity and that of others, and to know whom to approach if something goes wrong.
The Centre has been directed to file an affidavit detailing the progress made and the steps taken to implement the directions. The matter will be heard next on December 10.
Legal experts say the order strikes a deliberate balance that could shape platform regulation in India for years: affirming a constitutional right of the widest scope while placing the burden of safety squarely on platforms, intermediaries and the state — not on children themselves.
(Reporting based on The Indian Express, The Hindu and Bar & Bench.)