The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in order to encourage awareness, deployment, and use of the Aarogya Setu app, formally demanded “priority” assistance from social media for “outreach purposes” to reach “all mobile users in India.”
The ministry office wrote, “In the greater public interest, in addition to addressing this emergency health situation, you are asked to use your full capacity to connect with your users and make them aware of the need for the Aarogya Setu app and promote the importance it offers. In an eMailed loop, which ET has viewed and checked.
Platforms must make a minimum contribution “within one week” from users and must exchange a progress update with the Ministry on a regular basis, added the letter.
A senior officer from MeitY told ET on condition of anonymity while verifying the circular, “Every company in the physical and the digital world is doing it. Our aim is to reach out to all the mobile users in the country while ensuring the privacy and security of every user. We are trying, in all possible manner, to reach out to the people.”
The application also arrived a couple of days after the Google Play Store downloaded over 10 million applications and was the top ranking in the health and wellness category of the iOS App Store.
Google Speaker said: “We help non-profit developers, state and local health departments with publicly accessible crisis response applications and pages in response to the COVID 19 pandemic in an emailed answer to ET questions.
We also launched ad grants, Google Maps Crisis Response Credits and fund the most widely used API and SDKs for implementing crisis responses.
On Friday, ET announced that the Aarogya Setu App could consider objectives outside its central, citizen-facing contact tracing application case to raise awareness and accelerate the deployment of the application to the benefit of telecommunications companies, banks and other institutions operating in wide distribution networks.
It was noted that the software can be used to “understand the disease” by using aggregated anonymous data generated by the software to manage lockdowns and help with other aspects, such as predictive modeling.
The government’s urgency to build awareness and push deployment is comprehensible because the app only becomes successful once the lock down is removed and people begin to travel.
