Due to Security Concerns, India Bans Chinese Betting and Lending Apps

February 7, 2023 ChinaIndia Crime & Legal

According to reports cited by India’s ANI on Sunday, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has started the process of banning and blocking 138 betting apps and 94 loan lending apps with connections to China.
According to Section 69 of India’s IT code, the Ministry of Home Affairs advised that the MeitY ban and block these apps by the following week.

The IT law permits the government to prohibit public access to content for a variety of reasons, including the protection of national security. Orders made in accordance with this clause are often of a confidential nature.

Requests for comment from MeitY and the Ministry of Home Affairs were not immediately fulfilled.

India has outlawed popular Chinese apps since 2020, when political tensions with China erupted after a border incident. China expressed worries about bilateral commercial and trade cooperation after India last year restricted access to many mobile apps due to security concerns.

Nearly half of the top 20 free apps in India in the first half of 2020 were developed by major Chinese tech companies, including TikTok and Helo from ByteDance, the popular mobile game PUBG from Tencent Holdings, and UC Browser and VMate from Alibaba Group Holding, the company that owns the South China Morning Post. These apps are no longer listed on the download charts.

Authorities claimed that the collection of user data by the Chinese apps posed a threat to India’s national security; China has refuted this claim. In defense of itself, TikTok said that its user data was kept on servers in Singapore and the United States, not in China.

However, it has not been all plain sailing, especially for the TikTok content creators who lost their millions of followers and accompanying sponsorship income practically overnight. The majority of Indian users of Chinese applications that were banned were able to switch to other platforms pretty quickly.

65 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are under the age of 35, and 825 million of them are online today; by 2025, that number is predicted to increase by another 300 million. According to the official news agency, China has 1.03 billion internet users already.