Arogya Setu App: Mystery deepens after ministry and NIC deny any knowledge of its origin

It is no longer a secret that the NDA Government at the Centre has been dodgy with data. It has tampered with data related to the GDP, employment and crime. It has told Parliament that it has no data about the death of migrant and health workers this year due to the pandemic; nor did it have data about job losses and farmer suicides. It is also known that the Government has refused to share details about the PM CARES fund with citizens, ingenuously arguing that it is a private and not a government-run fund. Indeed, it has done everything to cripple the Right to Information (RTI) Act and stonewall it. It therefore comes as no surprise, though it is shocking, that ministries and departments which claim to ‘own, update and maintain’ the Arogya Setu App and the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which supposedly ‘designed, developed and hosted’ the App’s official website, have now admitted that they do not know anything about the App.

In shocking admissions made to the Central Information Commission, they have denied holding the ‘files’ related to the App or the data; they have denied any knowledge about the origin of the App or who has the custody of the data and with whom they have been shared. Media reports about the shocking disclosures prompted the Government into damage control mode and late on Wednesday, it sought to dispel doubts by blandly stating that there was no mystery about the creation of the App. It also claimed that the App was the result of a Public-Private-Partnership between the best minds in the business of harnessing technology for public good.

The RTI applicant, however, had sought details about the experts consulted, the process of approval, protocols followed, the law under which the App was developed and whether the Government had plans to put up a legal framework. He also wanted information about the auditing process. The Government clearly did not want to share these details and both NIC and the ministry of Electronics and Information Technology replied on record that they had no information. The curious conduct appears to vindicate Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s blunt statement that the Arogya Setu App was a “sophisticated surveillance system outsourced to private operators and with no institutional oversight”.

Sceptics had raised the flag at the speed with which the App was launched without public consultations. There were also doubts about the efficacy of a contact tracing app in a country as large, as poor and with as rickety a public health system as in India. But the Government spent Crores of Rupees to advertise the App; brand ambassadors popped up to promote it as a ‘personal bodyguard’; the Prime Minister appealed to people to download the App and BJP leaders mocked Rahul Gandhi for his alleged lack of understanding of technology. The App, it is now clear, made no difference to the spread of the pandemic.

It failed to protect people who downloaded it in good faith and it is not clear how it helped the central government contain the pandemic in the states. Indeed, it is not even clear that the Centre ever shared the data with the states. But it is equally clear that somebody or some people gained, that some people have used the enormous data collected from people. But will this brazenly autocratic, opaque and secretive Government ever share these details?