As World Moves to Ban Kids Online, India Tests a Softer Path

A graded approach, as India is planning, has an inherent logic over blanket bans, writes Subimal Bhattacharjee

Critics have raised concerns about constitutional rights, enforcement feasibility, and the risk of unintended consequences that could actually worsen child safety online.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

In February this year, at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, French President Emmanuel Macron looked across the hall towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi and issued a challenge that was part diplomatic nudge, part civilisational assertion.

"Mr Prime Minister, you will join this club," he said with characteristic Gallic confidence, urging India to ban social media for children. "Protecting children is not regulation—it is civilisation." The words landed with force. They also crystallised a debate that has been quietly gathering speed inside India's corridors of power for months.

Macron's appeal came in the context of a global wave of legislative action. Australia had already fired the first shot. In December 2025, it became the first country in the world to enforce a minimum age of 16 for social media use, under the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024. The law, which took effect on 10 December, required platforms to deactivate underage accounts and empowered the government to impose fines of up to A$49.5 million on companies that repeatedly failed to comply.

Within its first month, roughly 4.7 million underage accounts were removed. France followed, with its National Assembly approving a bill in January 2026 to bar children under 15 from social media, making it the second country to move towards such a restriction. Spain, Greece, and Indonesia announced similar plans in quick succession.

India was being asked to choose a side. As reports suggest, it appears to be moving in the same direction—but in its own distinct way.

India's Distinctive Policy Path

On 6 March 2026, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah made a headline-grabbing announcement in his budget speech: the state would ban social media access for children below the age of 16. The announcement, framed within a comprehensive education reform initiative called 'Uttama Kalike, Ujjwala Bharata', was catalysed in part by a vice-chancellors' conclave held in February, where university leaders flagged that digital addiction was visibly eroding academic performance and physical fitness among students.

Within hours, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu announced that his state, too, would introduce regulations, targeting children below 13, within a 90-day timeframe.

The twin announcements marked a significant moment in Indian policy history. For the first time, state governments had moved social media regulation for minors from the realm of academic worry into hard legislative intent. Yet, it is at the central government level where the more structurally significant response is being crafted.

According to senior officials, the Centre is preparing a separate law that would govern age-based social media access for all minors under 18, one that deliberately stops short of a blanket ban. The legislation, expected to be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament, would divide children into three age brackets, each with different restrictions. It could include time-based limits, mandatory parental consent, and algorithmic safeguards against exploitative design.

The Evidence Driving the Push

The Economic Survey 2025–26 had already set the intellectual groundwork, recommending that platforms be made responsible for enforcing age verification and age-appropriate defaults, particularly for social media, gambling apps, auto-play features, and targeted advertising.

The survey had also flagged troubling data: Indian students and young people between the ages of 9 and 24 spend an average of three to seven hours daily on social media platforms. Research has linked this level of usage to heightened rates of anxiety, depression, cyberbullying, and body image disorders.

The case for an age bar on social media is built on mounting clinical and sociological evidence. Platforms are not passive conduits of communication; they are engineered environments optimised for engagement, with algorithms that learn to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, serve outrage and fear, and keep users, especially young users, in an addictive loop. For adolescent brains, still developing in their capacity for impulse control and emotional regulation, this is a uniquely hazardous design.

A graded approach, as India is planning, has an inherent logic over blanket bans. Children of eight years age and children of 17 years are not the same beings. Their digital literacy, social awareness, and emotional resilience differ substantially. A tiered framework respects this developmental reality. It also avoids the democratic discomfort of treating near-adults as infants, a criticism frequently levelled at Australia's blunter policy instrument.

India's scale also gives its regulatory decisions an outsized global importance. With over a billion internet subscribers and one of the world's youngest populations, any framework India adopts will be watched—and potentially adapted—by countries across the Global South that lack the legislative infrastructure of Europe or Australia but face the same digital harms.

Constitutional, Practical, and Social Risks

Yet, the counter arguments are not trivial. Critics have raised concerns about constitutional rights, enforcement feasibility, and the risk of unintended consequences that could actually worsen child safety online.

Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression. For teenagers, social media is increasingly the primary space where political opinions are formed, communities are built, and creative voices find audiences. A heavy-handed restriction, even one dressed in the language of protection, could be challenged as a disproportionate infringement of this right.

India's digital landscape is structurally unlike Australia's. In an overwhelming number of Indian households, a single smartphone is shared between parents and children. Age verification through government IDs, the likely mechanism given Aadhaar's ubiquity, is difficult to implement cleanly in such contexts.

Teenagers who already learned to circumvent the TikTok ban using VPNs are unlikely to be stumped by an age gate. Also, parents wilfully provide their phones to children for extended periods.

The Real Battle Lies in Platform Design

On displacement risk: perhaps the most structurally serious concern is that age bans push young users towards unregulated or more dangerous corners of the internet.

Logged-out browsing, obscure platforms, and anonymous forums all bypass safeguards entirely. A teenager locked out of Instagram may simply migrate to a darker, less moderated space where protections are even weaker. Regulation, if it is to work, must close the drain, not just plug the visible hole.

There is also the question of regulatory fracture. Karnataka has banned access to teens under 16, while Andhra Pradesh targets under-13 teens. This creates inconsistencies that are confusing for platforms, families, and children alike. A national framework is essential—but it must also be enforced, and India's record on enforcing technology regulations at scale is, to put it diplomatically, a work in progress.

The deeper risk of the current conversation is that it is almost entirely focused on access rather than design. Whether a child can log on to Instagram at 14 or 16 years of age matters far less than what Instagram does once they are on it. The algorithms that serve increasingly extreme content, the autoplay features engineered to override a user's intention to stop, the notification systems calibrated to interrupt sleep, these are the actual mechanisms of harm. None of them are addressed by an age gate.

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 already requires parental consent for processing data of users under 18, but it remains unenforced. A new law layering age restrictions on top of an unenforced existing framework risks the same fate.

What is needed alongside the age bar is algorithmic accountability: mandatory transparency about how recommendation systems work, enforceable prohibitions on behavioural targeting of minors, and independent audits of platform design.

The global momentum, from Macron's passionate appeals to Australia's trailblazing legislation, reflects a genuine reckoning with the cost of a decade of regulatory inaction. India is right to respond. Its instinct to resist blanket bans in favour of a graded, developmentally sensitive approach reflects a maturity of policy thinking that the conversation deserves. But age bars are a beginning, not an answer. The real battle for children's digital safety will be fought not at the login screen, but inside the code.

(Subimal Bhattacharjee is a Visiting Fellow at Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University Bloomington, USA, and a cybersecurity specialist. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)