On the complaint of Activist, Saurav Das government had been served notice by the Central Information Commission for what it called "evasive answers" on who created the contact tracing app that the government pushed as an essential tool in the fight against the coronavirus.
ABOUT AAROGYA SETU APP
· Aarogya Setu is an Indian open-source COVID–19 "contact tracing, syndromic mapping, and self-assessment" digital service, primarily a mobile app.
· It was developed by the National Informatics Centre that comes under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the public-private collaboration and released in April 2020.
· The app reached more than 100 million installs in 40 days. It became the world’s fastest-growing mobile app with 50 million users in just 13 Days.
GOVERNMENT'S CLARIFICATIONS
Aarogya Setu's website says it was developed by the National Informatics Centre and the Information Technology ministry but according to the Central Information Commission, various ministries and departments had given "evasive answers" to a Right to Information (RTI) query on who created the Aarogya Setu app. The Aarogya Setu app was developed in a record time of around 21 days, to respond to the exigencies of the Pandemic with Lockdown restrictions only for the objective of building a Made in India Contact Tracing App with the best of Indian minds from Industry, Academia and Government, working round the clock to build a robust, scalable and secure app, said government.
ABOUT CENTRAL INFORMATION COMMISSION
· The Central Information Commission is a statutory body, set up under the Right to Information Act in 2005. It falls under the Ministry of Personnel and training.
· Bimal Julka is the current CIC chief commissioner who is appoints by the president.
LIST OF COUNTRIES WITH OFFICIAL CONTACT TRACING APPS
Like Arogya Setu in India, many other countries have their apps for tracking Covid-19 cases like ;
· Australia COVIDSafe
· StopCovid in France
· HaMagen in Israel
· NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app in for England etc...