Centre prepares SOP for reporting child sexual abuse material online

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) started consultations this week for preparing a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, officials said.

MeitY will be meeting with the Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD), the Department of Telecommunications, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) and the Ministry of Home Affairs to consult on the matter, officials said.

The SOP will explain how a person can report CSAM, where to report it, and what the process will be. It will also lay out what intermediaries - social media companies - have to do as per the rules and law. There will be clear directions on what the intermediary, the victim and law enforcement agencies (LEAs) have to do once CSAM is reported, officials said.

The Supreme Court is hearing a matter on reporting of CSAM. On September 24, it gave MeitY and the Ministry of Law and Justice a “last opportunity” to file a report on the steps taken to implement its 2024 judgment in the Just Rights for Children Alliance v S Harish, which requires social media intermediaries to report such material to law enforcement, and on the precautions planned to prevent lapses in future. The court noted that no report had been filed despite its August 14 order. The Supreme Court has also reportedly asked the Centre to share a draft SOP with the petitioner four to five days before the next hearing on October 15.

This also comes as Meta and Google recently said they would report CSAM cases directly to Indian agencies. Until now, both companies reported such cases to the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which then passed them on to law enforcement in other countries. Meta said this month it will report child safety cases to the cybercrime portal run by I4C, and Google announced a similar plan on September 21.

Their announcements came after increased government scrutiny following a BBC Eye investigation whcih said Instagram carried ads using phrases like “rape video” and “child video” in India, which directed users to Telegram channels allegedly selling CSAM. Since then, MeitY as well as the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) summoned Meta’s officials and asked the company to explain itself.

One official said the WCD was earlier supposed to make this SOP, but now MeitY is doing it.

Officials said MeitY will follow the same approach it used for the SOP on non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII).

MeitY released the NCII SOP in November 2025. It came after the Madras High Court asked the Centre in July 2025 to prepare a “prototype” of what a victim should do when intimate content is shared online. The court gave this direction while hearing a case of a woman lawyer whose intimate images were allegedly circulated without her consent.

The NCII SOP says intermediaries must remove or block reported content within 24 hours. Victims can report through the app of the platform, grievance officers, One Stop Centres, the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (or helpline 1930), or the local police. Big social media platforms must use hash-matching and crawler tools to stop the content from being uploaded again. I4C will keep a hash bank, and the DoT will help in blocking the flagged links.

NCII and CSAM are legally distinct. NCII is intimate content of an adult that is shared without consent. CSAM is any sexual content showing a child. In India, CSAM is covered under the POCSO Act and Section 67B of the IT Act.