The internet has expanded children’s access to education, social connection and creativity, but it has also multiplied threats -- from online sexual exploitation and cyberbullying to exposure to harmful content, privacy invasion and addictive digital design. The core challenge lies in ensuring a balanced approach that safeguards children’s rights and protection while promoting digital opportunities.
India’s legal framework for online child safety is a mix of child protection laws and cyber regulations aimed at safeguarding minors from digital harms.
The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 criminalises sexual exploitation of minors, ensuring child-friendly procedures during investigation and trial. The Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000--especially Section 67B--penalises the publishing or transmission of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and mandates intermediaries to remove such content upon notification.
The IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 further strengthen accountability by requiring grievance redressal mechanisms, traceability of offenders and content moderation obligations, directly impacting children’s online safety. Key institutions such as the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), cybercrime police cells and the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) play vital roles in enforcement and coordination.
Additionally, the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023 introduces comprehensive data privacy safeguards, including protection of children’s personal data online. The Government has also released Draft Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules, 2025 for public consultation to operationalise the Act, marking a step towards a more secure, accountable and rights-based digital ecosystem for children.
Major online harms to children encompass a wide range of risks stemming from unchecked digital exposure. These include sexual exploitation and grooming, often leading to the creation and circulation of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM); cyberbullying, doxxing and associated psychological harm; and exposure to violent, extremist, or age-inappropriate content. Children also face privacy violations through data harvesting, profiling and targeted advertising, along with commercial exploitation via addictive design, in-app purchases and manipulative algorithms that encourage overuse.
Reports by UNICEF, WeProtect Global Alliance and the OECD highlight a surge in CSAM cases, online grooming and cyberbullying incidents, reflecting persistent gaps in platform accountability and transparency. In India, initiatives like eBaalNidan, the 1930 cybercrime helpline and the I4C (Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre) have been expanded to handle rising complaints and improve response mechanisms.
Children’s vulnerability arises from their limited digital literacy, developmental immaturity and dependence on adults, which make them distinct from adult victims of cybercrime. Consequently, global and national strategies now emphasise child-centred frameworks that integrate prevention, early detection, law enforcement coordination and psychosocial rehabilitation, ensuring a safe and empowering digital ecosystem for minors.
Several recent laws, rules and international precedents shape the evolving framework for online child safety:
These international models offer valuable comparative insights for India’s own regulatory evolution toward a child-safe digital environment.
India’s legal and regulatory framework for online child safety provides a solid foundation for criminalisation, content takedown and platform accountability, but several implementation gaps persist.
Enforcement remains weak--cross-border cybercrimes, encrypted communications and anonymised platforms make tracing offenders slow and complex. Platform accountability is evolving, yet tensions between privacy, encryption and child safety create regulatory grey zones. While laws like POCSO and the IT Act address offences, they rely heavily on reactive measures rather than preventive mechanisms.
Digital literacy among parents, teachers and children is limited, leaving users ill-equipped to recognise or report threats. Victim support systems, including counselling, child-friendly forensics and rehabilitation, remain underdeveloped, especially outside metropolitan areas. Law enforcement and cyber forensic capacities vary widely across states, causing uneven implementation.
Further, schools lack structured digital-safety curricula and platform transparency reports on CSAM, grooming and harmful content remain inconsistent.
Recent policy advisories and government reviews recommend age-appropriate design mandates, mandatory safety-by-design norms, rapid reporting channels and capacity-building initiatives for police, educators and child protection agencies. For meaningful impact, India must move from reactive criminalisation to a preventive, rights-based and tech-enabled ecosystem that integrates education, regulation and institutional coordination.
A comprehensive policy response to ensure child safety in digital spaces must rest on five key pillars:
Global experiences offer valuable insights for shaping India’s child online safety framework.
The UK’s Online Safety Act highlights the effectiveness of enforceable duties of care, age-appropriate design codes and independent regulatory oversight through Ofcom. It shows how clear accountability and transparency obligations can compel platforms to prioritise child safety.
The EU’s Better Internet for Kids (BIK) strategy stresses a multi-stakeholder, preventive approach, integrating education, awareness and Safer Internet Centres that provide reporting hotlines, helplines and child-friendly resources -- a model for India to emulate through national and state-level cyber awareness hubs.
The US debates on KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) and KOSPA illustrate the complex balance between safety, free speech and innovation, reminding policymakers to align safeguards with constitutional guarantees and avoid overreach.
For India, the path forward lies in adopting a duty of care framework tailored to its constitutional rights, diverse digital landscape and resource realities. This requires combining strong regulation with capacity building, ensuring that platforms, educators, parents and law enforcement work in tandem to build a safe and empowering digital environment for children.
To ensure tangible progress in child online safety, policymakers must focus on swift, actionable measures:
Together, these steps can build an immediate yet sustainable framework for protecting children in India’s evolving digital ecosystem.
Policy must avoid blunt censorship. Measures should be proportionate, transparent and subject to oversight. Privacy and free expression must be protected while designing technical safeguards (for example, client-side age signals, privacy-preserving moderation). Engagement with children, civil society, educators, industry and technologists creates pragmatic, rights-respecting solutions.
Protecting children in digital spaces is a public-policy imperative that requires legal clarity, technological safeguards, education, enforcement capacity and sustained public engagement. The issue exemplifies contemporary governance challenges: designing laws that protect the vulnerable, enabling innovation and ensuring state capacity and accountability. A proactive, multi-layered strategy -- grounded in child rights and evidence -- will be essential to keep India’s children safe while allowing them to reap the benefits of the digital age. Meaningful multi-stakeholder engagement--involving children, educators, parents, civil society, industry and technologists--is vital for crafting pragmatic and context-sensitive policies. This inclusive approach can help India build a digital ecosystem that safeguards children while fostering innovation, creativity and constitutional freedoms.
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