How Many Phones Is India Tapping? The Radia Tapes Opened a Pandora's Box

In early December 2010, in the middle of the Radia tapes firestorm, officials in the Union Home Ministry told The Sunday Express that roughly 6,000 telephone numbers (mostly mobiles) were on the government's current interception list, along with 500-600 email IDs. For the first time, the scale of routine state surveillance in India had a number attached to it, and the number landed in the political discourse like a stone in still water.

The admission came with context that alarmed as much as it reassured. States were being asked to report their own interception numbers, and at least three or four, including West Bengal, told Delhi that their oversight committees had either never been set up or had become defunct. The mechanism that existed on paper dated to a 1997 Supreme Court ruling: the Union Home Secretary personally authorized each interception, with review by a committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary. The Home Secretary was said to reserve a daily 30-minute slot just to sign surveillance authorizations.

Union Home Secretary G K Pillai found himself at the center of the storm after a Wall Street Journal interview was read as an admission of the scale of tapping. On December 11 he issued a clarification: the interview had been misunderstood and quoted out of context, he had neither heard nor seen the Radia tapes, and the interceptions in question had been authorized on allegations of tax evasion and hawala, the subject of a CBDT investigation rather than press gossip.

But the underlying questions refused to die. The Radia tapes themselves, thousands of recorded conversations between lobbyist Niira Radia and politicians, industrialists, and journalists, were the product of an Income Tax wiretap that had leaked into the press, raising the question no official could fully answer: if the state's interception machinery was this leaky, who was watching the watchers?

On December 14, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged "nervousness in the corporate sector" over tapping powers and asked the Cabinet Secretary to review the rules within a month, warning that surveillance powers "have to be exercised with utmost care."

The debate never really ended. By September 2011, internal government documents cited in the press put the interception list at 8,736 telephones and 967 email IDs. The numbers had roughly doubled. And the questions first raised in December 2010 about oversight, leakage, and proportionality would return with far greater force in the 2021 Pegasus spyware controversy, when leaked lists of potential surveillance targets included Indian journalists, opposition politicians, and activists.