The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is set to send notices to Telegram and Signal over username-based calling features, a day after issuing a similar notice to WhatsApp, a government official told HT on Thursday. The notifications are expected to be issued on Friday.
“The rules apply to everyone. Similar notifications will be sent to Telegram and Signal on Friday,” the official said.
The move comes on the heels of MeitY’s notice to WhatsApp, which directed the company to pause the rollout of its username feature and provide a detailed explanation within three days. HT has learned that MeitY officials met WhatsApp representatives on Thursday at 11.30 am. According to people familiar with the discussions, the company requested additional time to respond, citing the upcoming weekend, while ministry officials reiterated their concerns about the feature. MeitY is expected to grant an extension once it receives a formal request from WhatsApp.
The motivation was that the company started allowing users to reserve usernames ahead of the planned launch at the end of the year. The ministry said this feature could increase the risks of impersonation, identity theft, phishing and digital fraud by allowing users to call without revealing their numbers.
Hiding a phone number behind a username makes it difficult to track who is messaging whom, officials and experts said, at a time when impersonation scams are already a widespread problem in India.
Referring to Wednesday’s notice, a WhatsApp spokesperson earlier said that the feature has not yet been activated and will be rolled out slowly later this year, and that the company has reserved usernames that resemble public figures, government bodies and celebrities so that they can only be claimed by their rightful owners.
The founder of Indian messaging app Arattai, separately, signaled the withdrawal on Thursday. Arattai will disable the username-based account feature “to comply with regulatory change,” Sridhar Vembu, the company’s founder, said on Thursday. He did not specify which regulatory changes he referred to.
The official mentioned above said that the government’s greatest concern about the WhatsApp application is due to its broad scope. “WhatsApp facilitates around 50 crore calls daily. People trust it blindly. That’s why our concerns with WhatsApp are much greater than Telegram, which has a much lower call rate of around 2.5 crore calls in India,” the official said.
The official also suggested that pushing the WhatsApp username would be a competitive move against Telegram. “Maybe they want to take over the Telegram market. WhatsApp wants to monopolize this space,” the official said.
Friday’s notifications will mark the second time this year that Telegram has attracted regulatory attention. The app was temporarily blocked during the NEET-UG re-examination due to concerns over the circulation of test materials — an episode the official said had already led to increased government scrutiny on username-based platforms before this week’s notifications.
By contrast, Signal has received relatively little regulatory attention in India so far, despite being named alongside WhatsApp and Telegram in the SIM-related directive. Friday’s notice will be among the first direct actions the department has taken against the app specifically over its username feature.
All three platforms — along with Arattai and Snapchat — fall under the Communications Ministry’s SIM linking guidelines, which require messaging accounts to be linked to physical SIM cards for traceability and mandate logging out of web sessions at least once every six hours.
