In September, we filed three RTI applications with the Delhi Police asking about the signal jammers it uses. Three of its units have now answered the first one, and their answers don’t sit well together. The Provisioning and Logistics (P&L) unit told us that the Delhi Police, which works under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), spent Rs 161.27 crore on 34 jammers between July 2024 and May 2026. Every one of them was bought from the public sector Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) without a tender. Thirty are vehicle-mounted convoy jammers covering 20 to 6,000 MHz, the stretch of spectrum our phones, Wi-Fi and GPS depend on, and they cost about Rs 4.61 crore apiece. The other four are “smart jammers” meant for drones, bought at Rs 5.71 crore each, and they appear to be a model the Cabinet Secretariat lists as portable. The Security Unit, for which the jammers were bought, would not tell us what it holds, who can switch a jammer on, or how often that has happened. It called all of this “highly confidential” and a matter of “VVIP security interests”. All it would say is that jammer vehicles are given to protected persons “as per yellow book & threat perception,” a reference to a MHA security manual the public cannot read. The North-West District said it has “no such standing order or circular” on jamming, and invited us to visit its police stations on a working day to look at records of seized jammers. Not one unit shared the permissions behind these jammers, or said whether anyone has checked what jamming does to calls to 112. We are filing first appeals, we have filed RTI applications with ECIL, and we will publish whatever comes back.BackgroundOn September 16, 2026, we wrote that no law lets the police jam your phone. During the student sit-in at Jantar Mantar, which ran from June 20 to July 25, 2026, mobile networks in central Delhi went dark on July 20 and 22. The MHA had suspended mobile internet within roughly 1.5 km of the site, yet ordinary calls were failing too, and there were reports that the police had switched on portable jammers. The Delhi Police has neither confirmed nor denied this. A few weeks later, after a building collapsed in Satya Niketan on September 6, 2026 and killed seven people, it was quick to deny that jammers had been used at the rescue site.On September 8, 2026, we filed three applications. One asked about the jamming equipment the Delhi Police holds and the rules for using it (DEPOL/R/E/26/10072), one about Jantar Mantar (DEPOL/R/E/26/10074) and one about Satya Niketan (DEPOL/R/E/26/10077). The first carried eleven questions. We wanted to know what equipment the force has, the contracts and approvals behind it, the rules and officers that govern its use, its deployment logs since 2023, how much it has spent, what jamming does to emergency number 112, and how many illegal jammers it has seized. We defined jamming equipment broadly enough to cover anti-drone systems and call blocking systems. Police Headquarters sent the application on to several units, and this post looks at the three replies we have so far, from P&L, the Security Unit and the North-West District.Since then the questions have only become more pressing. On October 9, at the request of the Delhi Police, MHA suspended mobile internet for 24 hours across a 4 km radius in central Delhi ahead of a protest at Jantar Mantar. Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha has asked the Supreme Court to look into, among other things, “the use of phone jammers” during the protests that followed. On October 11, the court directed that “Internet facilities should function unhindered”. The case comes up again on October 15.Analysis: Three units, three different answersEach of the three units received our application on September 15, 2026. Their replies keep pointing at one another, and in places they flatly contradict each other. The table below puts them side by side.What the P&L unit disclosedThe P&L reply is dated October 8, 2026. It lists two purchases, both “procured by CSA Branch/P&L for use in Security Unit” and both made “through M/s ECIL on nomination basis”.The reply puts the exact costs at Rs 1,38,42,24,417 and Rs 22,84,93,208. The per unit figures are our own arithmetic.ECIL is a Hyderabad company wholly owned by the Union government through the Department of Atomic Energy, and it also makes electronic voting machines. Both models in the reply seem to match entries in the Cabinet Secretariat’s list of approved jammers. The vehicle jammer looks like the “EC-SVJEE-1100U (20MHz to 6000MHz)”, which the list pairs with an ECIL “Drone Jammer Kit compatible for SVJEE-1100”. The smart jammer looks like the “EC-SDJ-Mark 1 (400 MHz to 6000 MHz – for aerial RCIED threats)”.RCIED stands for remote-controlled improvised explosive device, which is a bomb set off by a radio signal. An aerial RCIED is a drone carrying one. A 2020 CAG audit describes the Security Unit as “entrusted with security of Protected Persons”. An earlier RTI reply showed that the Delhi Police had 518 protectees on 31 March 2024 and paidRs 723.83 crore in salaries to the personnel guarding VIPs in 2023-24.A band of 20 to 6,000 MHz takes in almost everything a phone uses, from 2G to 5G (barring millimetre-wave 5G), along with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM radio and police radio. When we asked which bands the equipment covers, P&L replied “Does not relate”. The bigger purchase, worth Rs 138.42 crore, was made on May 23, 2026, less than four months before we filed our application.The Security Unit says it is ‘highly confidential’The jammers were bought for the Security Unit, so its reply matters most. Its Public Information Officer, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Security (Headquarters), wrote to us on October 7, 2026. The reply refuses to say what jamming equipment the unit holds, which officers can authorise its use, or whether and how often it has been deployed. This information, it says, “is highly confidential [sic] in nature and pertains to matters concerning the VVIP security interests,” and so it was withheld under Section 8(1)(a).The trouble is that a day later the P&L unit disclosed the very inventory the Security Unit called confidential. It gave us the number of vehicle jammers and smart jammers, the models, the dates and the prices, and said they were all “for use in the Security Unit”. Both units cannot be right. If the inventory can be made public without harm, there is little reason to hide the designations of the officers who authorise its use.When we asked under what circumstances jammers may be deployed, the Security Unit replied that “The VMJs vehicles are being provided to PPs as per yellow book & threat perception.” VMJs are vehicle-mounted jammers and PPs are protected persons. The Yellow Book is the MHA’s set of security guidelines for dignitaries other than the President, Vice-President and Prime Minister, who are covered by the Blue Book. It has never been made public. So whether a convoy jams every phone on the streets it passes through depends on a manual no citizen can read and a threat assessment no citizen can see.It is worth noticing what the Security Unit did not say. It did not tell us that it keeps no record of deployments. It said the information is too sensitive to share. Para 3(g) of the Cabinet Secretariat’s jammer guidelines requires information on every deployment to be maintained, so the records very likely exist. Yearly totals broken down by purpose would give away nothing about any single operation.The unit put the number of jammers it has hired, borrowed or lent at “Nil”. Our questions on 112, on its correspondence with Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and telecom companies, and on seizures, it said, do “not relate to this unit”.North-West District asks us to come to the police stationThe Public Information Officer of the North-West District, an Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police, wrote that “no such standing order or circular is available” on deploying jamming equipment. For most of our other questions, the reply said P&L would send the information.Our questions on correspondence with DoT, TRAI and telecom companies, and on seizures of illegal jammers, were treated differently. That information, the district said, “is lengthy, time consuming and requires diversion of manpower”. We “may visit Police Stations of this district on any working day (Monday to Saturday) between 10 am to 5.30 pm to inspect the permissible record”, and the Station House Officers have been told to expect us.On seizures, what we had asked for was the number of seizures, the number of FIRs and the provisions invoked. Section 7(9) of the RTI Act says information should ordinarily be given in the form it is asked for, unless that would “disproportionately divert the resources” of the public authority. A couple of totals does not come anywhere near that. Police stations in Delhi work round the clock, but for RTI applicants they apparently keep office hours.Where the replies fall short of the lawNone of the refusals give reasons, which Section 7(8)(i) of the RTI Act requires. Both refusals under Section 8(1)(a) invoke “national security” or “VVIP security interests” in a single sentence and stop there, without explaining what harm disclosure would do.The replies also undercut each other. P&L disclosed the inventory that the Security Unit withheld. It also disclosed the vendor, model, quantity, date and price while refusing the purchase orders that contain exactly those details. If anything in the contracts is truly sensitive, Section 10 allows it to be blacked out and the rest shared.Section 8(2) requires the harm of disclosure to be weighed against the public interest. Saying the matter “has not seen any larger public interest” announces a conclusion and skips the weighing. Rs 161 crore spent without a tender, on equipment that cuts off the phones of everyone in range, is about as clear a case of public interest as there is.Then there is the circle of referrals. The North-West District sent eight of our questions to P&L, and P&L said four of those had nothing to do with it. The Security Unit pointed us to P&L for two more. As things stand, nobody has answered our questions on approvals, on 112, or on correspondence with DoT and telecom companies. Some unit clearly holds these answers, since the Delhi Police itself seized a suspected jammer at Palika Bazaar in October 2024.Finally, the P&L reply is signed by an Assistant Public Information Officer (APIO) “for” the PIO. Under Section 5(2), an APIO’s role is to receive applications and pass them on. The power to refuse information belongs to the PIO under Section 7(1).Four smart jammers built to be carriedThe four smart jammers appear to be ECIL’s EC-SDJ-Mark 1, which the Cabinet Secretariat’s approved list files under “Manpack/Portable Mini Jammers”. If we have matched them correctly, the Delhi Police has owned, since July 2024, four jammers designed to be carried by a single person, at Rs 5.71 crore each.The government’s Jammer Guidelines 2025 define a smart jammer as “A jamming equipment which utilizes some intelligence to detect receivers operating in its range and then block that particular receiver, without disturbing other radio services”. Against a drone, that means picking out its control link and cutting it. What else these units can pick out is not public. We don’t know whether they can single out particular phones, or whether they log anything about the devices they detect. We have put these questions to ECIL.We also don’t know whether any of them were taken to Jantar Mantar. Our second application asks exactly that.Where are the G20 jammers?In September 2023, ECIL said its “high-powered” vehicle-mounted jammers “were deployed in the VVIP motorcades by the Delhi Police” during the G20 summit, and that they “were supplied to Delhi Police by ECIL”. It added that its smart anti-drone jammers had been deployed at Bharat Mandapam, where the summit was held.None of this shows up in the P&L reply, and the Security Unit would not say what it has. We asked for every piece of jamming equipment the Delhi Police held on 8 September 2026, and P&L listed only two purchases, from 2024 and 2026. Either the force holds more jammers than it has told us about, or the G20 jammers were on loan, sent back or retired. Whichever it is, the public still does not know how many jammers the Delhi Police has.Two sellers, no tender, no price listThe “nomination basis” was not entirely the Delhi Police’s call. Paras 3(c) and 4(f) of the Cabinet Secretariat’s guidelines allow government agencies to use jammers only from two public sector companies, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and ECIL, “at present”. Para 4(j) goes further and says that “Inviting open tender” from anyone else “is a violation of the policy of Government of India”.That leaves a market with two sellers, no tenders and no published prices. The few numbers that are public suggest the Delhi Police paid roughly what others pay. In 2022 the CRPF got approval to buy 10 vehicles fitted with RCIED jammers for VVIP convoys at an estimated Rs 45.19 crore, or about Rs 4.5 crore each. In May 2025, Punjab’s cabinet approved nine anti-drone systems for Rs 51.41 crore. That comes to Rs 5.71 crore each, the exact unit price the Delhi Police paid for its smart jammers.Without the contracts, though, nobody outside government can say what Rs 4.61 crore actually buys. We don’t know if it includes the vehicle or only the jammer, how many years of maintenance come with it, or what training. Nor do we know what it will cost to keep these systems running.To put the sum in context, the Delhi Police’s budget for 2026-27 is Rs 12,503.65 crore, and its own budget statement sets aside Rs 325 crore for “Machinery and Equipment” for the entire year. P&L did not tell us which budget head paid for the jammers.Jammers also go out of date quickly. In 2015 the CAG found that 32 jammers bought from BEL for Delhi’s jails between 2008 and 2014, at a cost of Rs 5.81 crore, were not doing their job, because “mobile phones were working even in the vicinity of these devices”. Networks have since moved from 3G to 5G, and every upgrade risks leaving older jammers behind.Rules written for VIP convoys, not protestsOn paper, jammers are tightly controlled. Section 48 of the Telecommunications Act, 2023, which came into force on 5 July 2024, says that “No person shall possess or use any equipment that blocks telecommunication unless permitted by the Central Government, or any authority authorised for specific purpose by the Central Government.” Doing so without authorisation can mean up to three years in prison, a fine of up to Rs 50 lakh, or both, under Section 42(3)(a).The Cabinet Secretariat’s Jammer Guidelines 2025, last updated on December 29, 2025, decide who may use jammers and for what. Under para 2(a), the Secretary (Security) approves jammers and smart jammers “for VVIP/VIP security” and low-powered jammers in exam halls, while jammers used against rogue drones or inside jails have needed an MHA licence since March 2023. Para 3(c) limits use to “the specific purpose for which permission has been granted”. Para 3(d) asks users to make sure “that jammers do not unduly interfere with the existing mobile and other telecommunication networks”. Para 3(g) requires information on every deployment to be kept and shared with the Cabinet Secretariat, the Special Protection Group and the Intelligence Bureau.The Security Unit’s reply fits this framework, since it says jammer vehicles go to protected persons under the Yellow Book. But look at what the guidelines leave out. Protests, crowd control and law and order are not mentioned anywhere. There are no limits on power, radius or duration. There is nothing about emergency calls, hospitals or warning the people nearby. And the guidelines still lean on the Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933 instead of the 2023 Act.In our view, a jammer approved for VIP security cannot lawfully be turned on a protest. We asked the Delhi Police for the permissions behind its jammers, including any under Section 48, and no unit has produced them.What jamming does to everyone elseA jammer can’t tell a protester’s phone from a doctor’s. Wherever jammers have run for long stretches in India, the people living around them have paid for it. A resident near Bengaluru’s Parappana Agrahara prison told MediaNama in 2025, “Because of the lack of network, we couldn’t call the ambulance, and we even lost a life.” He added, “we are not receiving any OTPs, so we can’t use UPI payments.” In Mangaluru, MLA Vedavyas Kamath said people could not “access the internet or even make phone calls within a 1.5-2 km radius of the jail”. In November 2025, the Karnataka high court asked for a technical report on whether the jail’s jammers were knocking out signal at the district court, about a kilometre away. Earlier that year, in February, the telecom industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) complained that illegal jammers and boosters were causing “call drops and low data speed for consumers”, and asked DoT to make sure BEL and ECIL deploy jammers “only in consonance with the Jammer Guidelines”.Those were static jammers in prisons and schools. A convoy jammer is “high-powered”, to borrow ECIL’s own words, and it moves through the city along with the person it protects. How far its effect reaches and how long it stays switched on is exactly what the Delhi Police’s rules would tell us, and it has not shared them. The US Federal Communications Commission warns that “Jammers can prevent 9-1-1 and other emergency phone calls made by the public”. We asked whether the Delhi Police has ever studied what its jammers do to calls to 112, to hospitals or to people nearby. Every unit either said the question did not concern it or passed it along.The Delhi Police has cut communications before. On December 19, 2019, during the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Cell, ordered that “communication of all types i.e. voice, SMS and internet” be halted from 9 am to 1 pm across parts of the city, including Mandi House, Seelampur, Jaffrabad, Mustafabad, Jamia Nagar, Shaheen Bagh and Bawana. In January 2021, the MHA suspended internet at Singhu, Ghazipur and Tikri, where farmers were protesting on Delhi’s borders, in an order addressed to the Commissioner of Police. Each time, there was a written order that people could read and challenge in court. A jammer needs no such order.How other democracies handle thisElsewhere, the police are either kept away from jammers altogether or bound by written limits. In the United States, the FCC’s enforcement advisory says “use of signal jammers by state or local authorities is generally prohibited” and “Only federal agencies are eligible to apply for and receive authorization”. Canada published a proposed order on October 10, 2026 that would let 27 police services use jammers, but only if they make every reasonable effort to keep interference to the “smallest physical area, fewest number of radio frequencies, appropriate power level and minimum duration”. Each use would have to be logged with its location, date, frequencies and purpose, and the log kept for five years. Back in 2015, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression and three regional counterparts declared that communication “kill switches”, which shut down whole parts of a communication system, “can never be justified under human rights law”.The Delhi Police owns at least 34 jammers bought for Rs 161 crore. The only rulebook it has named for using them is the Yellow Book, and nobody outside the government gets to read it.Action: Our RTIs to ECILECIL is a public authority under the RTI Act, and we have filed RTI applications with it too. We have asked how many jammers, anti-drone systems and drone jammer kits it has supplied, leased or lent to the Delhi Police since 2019, including the ones used at the G20, along with their models, dates and prices. We have asked for the purchase orders, invoices and contracts for the 30 vehicle jammers and four smart jammers, and what the price covers in terms of vehicles, maintenance and training. We want the technical specifications of both models, including their frequency bands, output power and effective radius. We have asked whether the smart jammers can identify and block individual phones, and whether either model logs identifiers such as IMSI or IMEI numbers. We have also asked what safeguards exist for calls to 112, hospitals, aviation and GPS, for the approvals and test reports behind both models, whether ECIL staff operate or maintain these jammers for the Delhi Police, and whether ECIL has ever received a complaint about interference.ECIL’s own appellate authority has ordered it to disclose before. In 2019, Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative asked ECIL about electronic voting machines, and its information officer withheld parts of the answer, citing Section 8(1)(a) among other exemptions. On appeal, ECIL’s first appellate authority directed that the information be collected and supplied.We will file first appeals against all three replies, before the First Appellate Authority of the P&L unit, the Additional Commissioner of Police (Security) and the Deputy Commissioner of Police, North-West District. We will ask that the figures on seizures and FIRs be sent to us in the form we asked for, without a trip to the police station. We will follow up with any other unit that received this application, and keep pursuing our applications on Jantar Mantar (DEPOL/R/E/26/10074) and Satya Niketan (DEPOL/R/E/26/10077). Every reply we get, including ECIL’s, will be published here.What we are asking forWe urge the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, and the MHA to publish the number, type and frequency range of every jammer the Delhi Police holds, and the permissions under which it holds them. The rules for using them should be public too, including the parts of the Yellow Book that deal with jammer vehicles, who can authorise a deployment, and the limits on radius, power and duration. The Delhi Police should publish yearly figures on deployments by purpose, drawn from the records the Cabinet Secretariat already requires it to keep. Jammers should never be used against protests or public gatherings, which no law or guideline provides for. Calls to 112 must always go through, and hospitals and emergency services should be warned before any planned deployment. And the Rs 161.27 crore spent on these jammers deserves an independent audit.We also urge the Cabinet Secretariat to bring its guidelines in line with the Telecommunications Act, 2023, with published limits on power, radius and duration and a duty to log every use, much as Canada is now proposing.This article was originally published on Internet Freedom Foundation.