On Monday, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant that the Centre plans to amend the IT Rules 2021 to make it a legal obligation for social media intermediaries not to let users under 18 open accounts. He added that parental or guardian consent, possibly backed by identity checks, was discussed as an option for educational websites. The statement came in a petition by the NGO Just Rights for Children Alliance, which questions how minors can independently join social media platforms. Mehta argued that agreements between minors and intermediaries are void contracts and should be prevented (Inc42).
The strongest case for the ban
The case for acting is serious. Voluntary age limits have plainly failed: most platforms set 13 as their minimum age, and self-declared birthdates are trivially false. Courts are right to ask why companies that operate in India should be exempt from the basic contract principle that minors cannot bind themselves. Parents, too, face a collective-action problem: a child who is the only one in their class without an account pays a social price, so a firm legal floor can help families who would otherwise hold the line alone. A statutory duty on platforms, rather than a duty on thirteen-year-olds to tell the truth, puts responsibility where the engineering capacity sits.
That is a fair reading of what the bench wanted. Reporting on the hearing says the court pressed for a statutory framework instead of voluntary safeguards, and the Centre agreed to examine the issue and take appropriate steps.
The problem: India already has a law for this
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 defines a child as a person under 18 and requires consent from a parent or legal guardian before processing a child's personal data. It also bars processing that has a detrimental effect on a child's well-being, a term PRS Legislative Research notes the Act does not define (PRS India). The final DPDP Rules, 2025 were published on 14 November 2025 and phase in over 18 months: the child-data and verifiable-parental-consent obligations are in the group that becomes mandatory after that window, not yet (Storyboard18).
In other words, Parliament chose a consent model: minors may participate, with a verified parent's agreement. The proposed IT Rules amendment would replace that with a prohibition for social media, with parental consent discussed only as an option for educational sites. That is a different policy, adopted by subordinate legislation, before the first one has been tested. A rule made under the IT Act cannot sensibly be the instrument that rewrites the age-of-participation settings of a later, specific Parliamentary statute. Expect that question to be litigated.
An 18 threshold is an outlier
Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, in force since 10 December 2025, restricts users under 16 from platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat (Parliamentary Education Office). Even that first-of-its-kind law stops at 16, and it is aimed at account holding on defined platforms. India's proposal would cover seventeen-year-olds, who are close to voting age and who use the internet for exam preparation, job searches, creative work and political speech. Inc42 puts India's social media users at more than 655 million; a hard 18 floor touches a very large number of teenagers whose rights to information and expression the Supreme Court has repeatedly treated as constitutionally protected.
Enforcement is the real design question
A ban is only as good as the age check behind it, and that is where the risks to everyone sit. Reliable age assurance for the whole user base means collecting identity or biometric signals from adults too, creating honeypots of sensitive data and chilling anonymous use. MediaNama's analysis of the draft DPDP Rules noted that the age- and parent-verification methods were left unclear, that shared family devices undermine consent models, and that only about 20% of Indian parents were estimated to have the digital awareness to give informed consent (MediaNama). If consent-based verification was already hard, a prohibition that depends on identifying minors precisely will be harder, and the likely outcome is over-collection of identity data and teenagers drifting to unregulated services, VPNs and sites with fewer safeguards.
There is also a drafting risk. "Social media intermediary" under the IT Rules is a broad category. Messaging, video, gaming and community-forum services could all be drawn in, and any carve-out for "educational websites" would require officials to decide what counts as educational. Vague scope hands discretion to the executive, and discretion over who may speak online is exactly what a pro-speech framework should minimise.
What a proportionate version looks like
None of this means doing nothing. A proportionate approach would:
- Sequence the rules. Let the DPDP verifiable-consent regime run through its 18-month phase-in, measure results, and amend only on evidence.
- Publish a draft for consultation. The amendment should come with a regulatory impact assessment, not first appear as a court statement.
- Tier by age. A lower hard floor with parental-consent pathways for older minors, plus default-safe design for teenagers (limits on contact from strangers, no targeted advertising, which the draft DPDP Rules already tie to penalties of up to Rs 200 crore), would target actual harms.
- Mandate privacy-preserving age assurance. Token-based checks that confirm age without handing platforms identity documents should be the standard, with data-minimisation duties and independent audit.
- Learn from Australia. Its enforcement record over the coming year will show what works and what only pushes teens elsewhere.
Bottom line
The Court's instinct that platforms should carry binding obligations is defensible. But the Centre's chosen instrument, an outright under-18 account ban by amending the IT Rules, skips the evidence, overlaps with a consent law that has not yet taken full effect, and invites an identity-verification build-out that creates its own harms. A clear text, a consultation and a pilot of the DPDP regime would give children better protection and leave India's open internet intact.