Cellebrite tools can now be bought by Indian government forensic institutions after Home Minister Amit Shah signed a one-year waiver of Make in India procurement rules. The waiver, set out in a Ministry of Home Affairs letter dated 7 January, cleared the way for the purchase of at least 422 items of foreign technology. An investigation by the digital-rights group Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), reported by Al Jazeera on 12 November 2026, found that India exempted an Israeli phone-hacking company from New Delhi’s own rules, allowing it to sell phone-extraction products and surveillance technology to government agencies. The findings raise questions about how data is taken from seized phones and who checks that process.
Under Make in India rules, preference must go to eligible Indian manufacturers, but exemptions are allowed with the minister’s approval. The January letter used that route. From the list of 422 items, the IFF identified 118 items under digital and multimedia forensics. They included Israeli firm Cellebrite’s Pathfinder, Inseyets On-Prem Pro and Inseyets Offline, along with products from Magnet, MSAB, Oxygen Forensics and Belkasoft. A separate ministry letter dated 20 January permitted the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to buy Cellebrite’s Premium Tool on a three-year licence for about 50 million rupees ($529,947). The waiver covers a year, and the letters behind it were sent in January.
Cellebrite tools on the waiver list
Al Jazeera reviewed a Delhi Police bid request for software for its National Cyber Forensic Laboratory, which works under the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre. The software must be able to use login tokens recovered from seized devices to access more than 100 cloud services, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, Tinder and Slack. States governed by the opposition Congress party, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka, also bought similar phone-extraction and cloning tools, according to the investigation. Cellebrite products are among the forensic tools in this class, and the waiver put them within reach of government buyers across the country. The bid request shows the scale of access the software is expected to give, reaching into messaging, dating and workplace apps from a single seized device.
What the waiver allowed
The waiver ran for one year from the 7 January letter, and the NIA permission followed on 20 January. Together, the two letters opened a direct route for government forensic institutions to buy foreign technology that would normally have to come from Indian makers first. The NIA licence covers the Cellebrite Premium Tool for three years at about 50 million rupees ($529,947). The list behind the waiver ran to at least 422 items, with 118 of them in digital and multimedia forensics. The IFF investigation traced those items from the ministry letters to the products named in them. Forensic institutions buying under the waiver can choose from the listed foreign products without first seeking an Indian maker for the same item.
The IFF says India has no statute or protocol that specifically authorises or regulates forced unlocking and full extraction of data from a phone seized by law enforcement. Oversight rests on an internal executive review mechanism, with no parliamentary or judicial oversight. That gap matters because Cellebrite tools are built to pull data from seized phones, and the material taken can then open cloud accounts through recovered login tokens. A 2017 Supreme Court ruling made privacy a fundamental right, and the IFF argues that the current setup leaves that right without a clear legal frame for phone extraction.
Cellebrite and the limits on oversight
Vrinda Bhandari, a Supreme Court lawyer working on digital rights, told Al Jazeera: “It’s now easier to conduct mass surveillance rather than targeted, specific surveillance and also possible to do more intrusive surveillance.” Her warning points to the scale of what full phone extraction allows once the tools are in wide use. The NIA, the Home Ministry and state home departments did not respond to Al Jazeera by publication time. The IFF investigation, reported on 12 November 2026, puts the Cellebrite waiver in public view for the first time.