NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant
India’s coronavirus contact tracing app Aarogya Setu is now open source for Android users, in a major development that will allay privacy concerns around the government-launched product. Making the source of the app open at a press conference in New Delhi on Tuesday, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant remarked that the development signified “Government of India’s commitment to the core design principles of transparency, privacy and security.”
“Releasing a source code of a rapidly evolving product is a challenging task. Developing and maintaining the source code is a huge responsibility,” Kant said at the press conference.
Kant further highlighted that no other product elsewhere in the world had been open-sourced at such a large scale. “Today, its scale and size are 115 million,” said Kant, noting that Aarogya Setu was the fastest app developed till date to reach 15 million subscribers in 13 days and 100 million in 41 days.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary Ajay Kumar Sawhney, also present at the event, said that the government planned on making the app open source on iOS and KaiOS in the coming days as well.
