Why we are starting Khara Index
India banned 13 app tricks in 2023. Nobody checks, every week and in public, what customers actually see. So we will.
In November 2023, India's Central Consumer Protection Authority notified the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns. They list 13 design tricks that apps and websites must not use on people in India: hidden fees that appear at the last step, add-ons ticked for you, fake countdown timers, subscriptions that are easy to start and hard to stop, and more.
In June 2025, the same authority asked e-commerce platforms to audit themselves for these tricks within three months.
The rules exist. What is still missing is a regular, public check of what an ordinary customer sees on screen today.
What Khara Index does
Every week, we check a batch of India's most used apps and websites the way a normal customer would. An AI agent does the shopping and saves dated screenshots and screen recordings. A person then confirms every finding against that evidence. Nothing is published until a person has checked it.
Before we name any company, we send it what we found and give it five days to reply. Its reply is published with our findings.
Every few weeks we publish a report: which apps we checked, which tricks we found, the evidence, and a grade. Every app starts at 24 karat, like pure gold, and each confirmed trick lowers its grade.
What we will not do
- We will not call a trick a trick without evidence anyone can repeat.
- We will not take money, ads or sponsorships from companies we might rate.
- We will not say an app is clean when we simply did not test it.
What comes next
Report 1 is coming soon. Until then we are posting short explainers, so you can learn to spot these tricks yourself. Start with the 14 tricks.
If you have seen a trick in an app, email a screenshot to hello@kharaindex.in. We check every one we receive.
Ryan Sethi, founder