Aarogya Setu becomes open source

Arogya Setu, India's Covid-19 contact tracing, syndromic mapping and self assessment mobile app is now open source. Announcing it yesterday in New Delhi, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, transparency, privacy and security have been the core design principles of Araogya Setu since it's inception and opening of the source code upto the developer community signifies Government of India's continuing commitment to this principle. He said, it is a unique thing as no other government product anywhere in the world has been open sourced at this scale.

 

Mr Kant said, today the scale and size of Arogya Setu is 115 million and it cuts across every smart phone and IVRS in 12 languages. He said, in just 41 days the mobile app crossed 100 million. Open sourcing an app’s code means the government will publish it on a public code repository. 

With the release of the source code in the public domain,



Government is looking to expand collaboration and to leverage the expertise of top technical brains and also to collectively build a robust and secure technology solution to help support the work of frontline health workers in fighting this pandemic together.

 

On 2nd April, Government launched Aarogya Setu mobile App for helping augment the efforts of limiting the spread of COVID19, with an objective of enabling Bluetooth based contact tracing,mapping of likely hotspots and dissemination of relevant information. The App has helped identify about 5 lakh Bluetooth contacts. Those who are identified as Bluetooth contacts of COVID19 positive cases or are classified as needing assistance based on their self-assessment, are contacted by National Health Authority. So far, the platform has reached out to more than 9 lakh users and helped advise them for Quarantine, caution or testing.