Children’s Online Safety in India

India’s approach to children’s online safety rests on three separate legal tools, not one law. This article covers the IT Act framework, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act‘s child-specific provisions, and the government’s education and awareness programmes.

📑 Contents

1Must Know
2Good to Know
3Test Yourself
4Great to Know
5Current Affairs

Must Know

India’s core legal framework for online safety rests on the IT Act, 2000 and the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
The IT Rules require intermediaries to exercise due diligence. They must inform users not to host, display, or share content harmful to children, or content that violates any law.
Where a violation is also a criminal offence, intermediaries must report it to the appropriate authority. Relevant laws include the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and the POCSO Act, 2012.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) mandates parental consent before any entity processes a child’s personal data. Anyone under 18 counts as a child under the Act.
The DPDP Act separately bans tracking, behavioural monitoring, and targeted advertising directed at children. This ban applies even where parental consent has been given.

Good to Know

Recent amendments to the IT Rules require intermediaries to remove unlawful content within three hours of a court order, or a reasoned takedown notice from the government.
On 10 February 2026, a separate IT Rules amendment targeted deepfakes and AI-generated content more broadly, across all internet users, not just children. Read more: Polity0161 — IT Rules 2021 and Deepfake/AI Content Regulation.
MeitY runs the Information Security Education and Awareness (ISEA) project, generating cyber-security awareness through workshops and training.
CERT-In, India’s national cyber-emergency response agency, regularly shares safety tips, posters, and videos aimed at child online safety specifically.
The Ministry of Education issued the PRAGYATA Guidelines on Digital Education in July 2020, for safe and effective online learning.
CBSE built on this with digital-etiquette guidelines, teacher cyber-security training, a Cyber Security Handbook, and advisories for school Cyber Clubs. NCERT added cyber safety to its curriculum, including a “Societal Impacts” chapter in Classes XI-XII.

Test Yourself

Great to Know

The framework layers three distinct mechanisms. Content moderation, under the IT Rules, controls what children can be shown. Data protection, under the DPDP Act, controls what can be collected about them. Education, under PRAGYATA and school-board guidelines, addresses how children and teachers navigate the space themselves.
The DPDP Act’s ban on tracking and targeted advertising for children is non-waivable. Parental consent unlocks basic data processing, but it cannot unlock behavioural tracking or ad targeting. That distinction treats some risks to children as too significant for a parent to consent away.
India’s “child” threshold under the DPDP Act is anyone under 18. This is stricter than comparable global rules, such as the EU’s GDPR (13-16, set by member states) or the US’s COPPA (under 13).
Online safeguards are one layer among several protecting children in India. See Polity0220 — Laws Protecting Children in Indian Schools, for the parallel legal framework governing physical classrooms.

Current Affairs

On 5 August 2026, MoS Women and Child Development Savitri Thakur gave a separate written Rajya Sabha reply. It covered India’s institutional framework against Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (OCSAE). It confirmed the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), a statutory body under the Ministry of Women and Child Development. NCPCR regularly coordinates with I4C and MeitY on this issue. It also runs awareness programmes on child rights, school safety, cyber safety, and the POCSO Act. NCPCR has published three key documents: Being Safe Online (2017), a Manual on Safety and Security of Children in Schools (updated 2020-21), and Guidelines on Preventing Cyber Bullying for School Children (2024). (Source: PIB)
The same reply detailed the ‘Sahyog’ Portal. It speeds up takedown notices sent to IT intermediaries, under Section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act, 2000. It enables faster reporting and compliance, specifically for Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material (CSEAM) and other unlawful online content.
The Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSEL), Ministry of Education, issued Guidelines on School Safety and Security, in line with NEP 2020. Circulated to all States and UTs on 1 October 2021, the advisory guidelines require schools to report and act on incidents of physical or sexual violence, bullying, or injury.
On 5 August 2026, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw gave this account of India’s framework in a written reply to the Lok Sabha. (Source: PIB)
The reply confirmed that the government studies global regulatory developments on children’s online safety, while reviewing India’s own legal and policy framework.
As of the reply, ISEA has conducted 6,650 awareness workshops nationwide, reaching more than 11.37 lakh participants. This includes school and college students, teachers, law enforcement, government personnel, and the general public.
Multilingual ISEA material, including handbooks, videos, posters, and cartoon stories for children, is published through isea.gov.in and staysafeonline.in.
The reply also confirmed CIET-NCERT has developed and disseminated its own resource materials on cyber safety, alongside NCERT’s curriculum additions.
22 July 2026: MeitY set out further steps to strengthen platform accountability, against child sexual abuse material online.
- Significant social media intermediaries must now deploy automated tools, to proactively detect known CSAM and similar unlawful content.
- Complaints involving nudity or morphed intimate images must be addressed within two hours, faster than the general three-hour takedown rule.
- Intermediaries must also report CSAM-related offences to the appropriate authorities, under the strengthened framework.
(Source: PIB)