Executive Watching Executive: The Missing Independent Oversight Body In The Telecommunications Interception Rules, 2024
Rishabh Sisodiya, Samarth Udasin & Rohit Kadian, National Law Institute University, Bhopal
ABSTRACT
The Telecommunications (Procedures and Safeguards for Lawful Interception of Messages) Rules, 2024, notified on 6 December 2024 under the Telecommunications Act, 2023, replaced a colonial-era interception framework with a fresh statutory scheme, yet reproduced its most significant institutional defect: the body charged with reviewing interception orders is composed entirely of serving executive officers, appointed by, and answerable to, the very government whose orders it reviews. This paper argues that the Review Committee, as constituted under rule 5 of the 2024 Rules, fails the sufficient safeguards limb of the proportionality standard articulated by the Supreme Court of India in Justice K S Puttaswamy v Union of India and subsequently read as the ‘fifth prong’ of proportionality in Gujarat Mazdoor Sabha v State of Gujarat and Ramesh Chandra Sharma v State of Uttar Pradesh. It is tested further against the independent- authorisation standard laid down by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in Big Brother Watch and Others v United Kingdom. Drawing on comparative institutional models from the United Kingdom, Germany and South Africa, and on recent judicial engagement with the 2024 Rules including the Chhattisgarh High Court’s 2026 ruling in Shri Ravi Shankar Ji Maharaj v Central Bureau of India, the paper proposes a concrete institutional redesign: a statutorily independent Communications Oversight Board, headed by a retired Judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court, empowered with binding ex-post review and, for non-emergency orders, ex-ante concurrence.
Keywords: Administrative Law; telecommunications interception; proportionality; independent oversight; Puttaswamy; Big Brother Watch; Review Committee; surveillance reform.
