Aarogya Setu inspires Google & Apple: India’s Coronavirus tracker app will now be replicated by the world’s best

“Necessity is the mother of invention”, and what bigger necessity than tackling a pandemic that has infected more than 1.8 million people worldwide, and just fewer than 1.15 lakh dead. India’s indigenous piece of invention is the ‘Aarogya Setu’- a Coronavirus tracker app which is winning praise from both tech giants and intergovernmental organisations.

‘Aarogya Setu’ which is available for download on both the Google Play Store (Android) and App Store (Apple) helps you track the Coronavirus infection by using your smartphone’s Global Positioning System (GPS) and Bluetooth, and determining whether you have been near a COVID-19 infected person or not.

This multilingual app developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) respects privacy by encrypting user data and accesses the location of the user to know if the area the user is in falls within the database of infected areas and with the help of an activated Bluetooth, it also finds out if the user has been within six feet of the infected person.

The App is a crucial asset in contact-tracing as it traces all contacts of the infected person over the last 14 days and also assesses the risk of infection. The authorities reach out to all those who may be at the risk of getting infected with a curated message and necessary medical interventions.

It is important to bear in mind that South Korea has effectively used data collection and disease surveillance in order to contain the Coronavirus outbreak. In South Korea, the government detailed the patients infected and the connection between them and what provinces they were in. The health authorities then posted coded (numbered) log of the patients prior to confirmation of the infection, and based on such data collection and disease surveillance, warnings were issued to the users if an infected person was within a radius of 100 metres.

In India, the Modi government has found the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app to be very useful in tracing COVID-19 contacts and that too with zero privacy concerns, as it deletes user data every 30 days because of its very design. It has been an instant hit within the country and crossed 1 crore downloads in less than ten days of its launch.

According to Principal Scientific Advisor to Government of India Dr K Vijaya Raghavan, the app is an important weapon in the fight against COVID-19. Talking to AIR News, Raghavan said that the app is critical because if someone tests positive for the novel virus, then people who come into contact with that person can be identified.

With the passage of time, the app will also be updated to include other features aimed at effectively combating the Wuhan virus. Prime Minister Modi has already hinted that ‘Aarogya Setu’ is an essential tool when it comes to combating the Coronavirus and that it can “subsequently act as an e-pass to facilitate travel”.

Relying heavily on the use of technology and Artificial Intelligence through the tracker app, Prime Minister Modi promoted its use even during his marathon conference with the Chief Ministers.

Referring to South Korea and Singapore’s efforts towards contact tracing, PM Modi said, “based on those experiences, India has made its own effort through the app which will be an essential tool in India’s fight against the pandemic.”

At a time when India is effectively using technology and data collection for Coronavirus contact tracing, the effort has won praise from the World Bank itself.

The Washington-based intergovernmental agency has recognised the app’s success in contact tracing, in its report, which stated, “Digital technologies can also be used to monitor the spread of COVID-19. Such initiatives, largely voluntary, have been successful in helping combat the pandemic in East Asia. Incentives also can be provided to those who report symptoms. India recently launched an app, Aarogya Setu, that uses location data from persons’ smartphones to tell users if they have been near someone who tested positive for COVID-19.”

In fact, the ‘Aarogya Setu’ app might just turn out to be a game-changer, something as big as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which has gone on to set new benchmarks for tech giants across the world.

UPI’s growth story in India even led to Google recommending the Federal Reserve, viz. the Central Bank of the United States to replicate the United Payments Interface (UPI) model for its “new interbank 24x7x365 RTGS with integrated clearing functionality to support faster payments in the United States”, last year.

In fact, Google has been quite vocal about the inspiring success of UPI. Caesar Sengupta of Google India had even gone on to say, “We’ve been pretty vocal that we believe the right model for driving digital payments is through partnership between banks, governments and tech companies through open and standard-based infrastructures like UPI.”

Now, ‘Aarogya Setu’ too seems to have inspired the American tech giants- Apple and Google towards exploring further into the scope of developing disease tracker apps. According to Times of India, days after the launch of ‘Aarogya Setu’, Google and Apple announced that they were building a software on the lines of India’s Coronavirus tracker app.

India too has recognised how Google and Apple have drawn inspiration from ‘Aarogya Setu’, as Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kanta tweeted, “India leads the way in contact tracing for COVID-19: privacy-first by design, secure, robust and scalable to billion users. Glad to see Apple and Google joining hands to develop contact tracing on the lines of Aarogya Setu.”

UPI has already inspired upon Google, which now operates Google Pay, an app supported through UPI, in India. Now, it seems that another technology, that is, Aarogya Setu, developed by the Indian government is becoming a source of inspiration for the global technology companies. India developed the mobile app as a part of its monumental campaign to defeat the Chinese virus. But it seems that in doing so, India has laid down a new benchmark when it comes to the role of technology in disease tracking and combat.