New Delhi: The Supreme Court has stayed every pending high court challenge to the Union government’s Sahyog portal and its use of Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act to order online content takedowns, halting cases filed by X Corp, the DigiPub News India Foundation and comedian Kunal Kamra. The apex court will take up the Union’s plea to consolidate the cases on 10 August, and has signalled that it may decide the constitutional question itself.
In an order passed on 22 July and seen by ThePrint, a Bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, issued a notice on transfer petitions filed by the Union of India, which asked the court to move the cases to a single forum. The Bench made the notice returnable on 10 August, directing that the high court proceedings remain stayed in the meantime. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appeared for the Union.
In its transfer petitions, the Union argued that parallel proceedings on validity of a central law across more than one high court could produce conflicting decisions. The matter will be heard next on 10 August.
The order freezes four matters—two before the Karnataka High Court, and two before Bombay High Court.
One of the Karnataka cases is linked to X Corp, which filed a challenge on 5 March last year, seeking a declaration that Section 79(3)(b) does not confer the power to issue blocking orders, and that content can be taken down only under Section 69A of the IT Act. In September 2025, a single judge, Justice M. Nagaprasanna, had dismissed the plea, holding that Sahyog portal was a facilitation tool, and that binding blocking powers remained under Section 69A. X Corp appealed, and its appeal is one of the two matters in Karnataka High Court now stayed.
The second one is the appeal by DigiPub News India Foundation, a collective of digital news publishers, along with journalist Abhinandan Sekhri. DigiPub had intervened in support of X Corp before the single judge, arguing that it was journalists and news organisations whose speech was directly affected by secret takedown orders. After the judge rejected both X Corp’s petition and its intervention, DigiPub filed its own appeal, contending that Section 79 is a safe-harbour provision that does not create a takedown regime.
The two matters in Bombay High Court were filed in February 2026. In the first, Kunal Kamra challenged the constitutional validity of Sahyog portal, and the 2025 amendment to Rule 3(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, 2021, which requires intermediaries to remove flagged content within 36 hours. His plea argues that the portal enables takedowns without notice to the person who posted the content, or a hearing, in breach of natural justice and the free-speech guarantee under Article 19(1)(a). The second case, filed by Senior Advocate Haresh Jagtiani, mounts a parallel challenge to the same portal and rules.
The stay has overtaken a timeline set in Bombay High Court, where the Kamra matter was to move ahead this month. On 16 July, a Division Bench of Acting Chief Justice Ravindra Ghuge and Justice Gautam Ankhad had directed the Centre to file its affidavit by 29 July, and posted the petitions for hearing on 14 August. That hearing is now stayed.
The Sahyog portal was developed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, and disclosed to the Delhi High Court in December 2024 as a platform to route takedown communications between government agencies and intermediaries. The petitioners across all four cases contend that it lets ministries, state departments and police direct the removal of content without the procedure and safeguards set out in Section 69A and the Blocking Rules of 2009.