INTRODUCTION
AAROGYA SETU, i.e., a bridge for liberation from disease, is a digital service platform, primarily a mobile application developed by the Government of India. Its main goal or its primary aim is to connect COVID-19 related health issues with the people of India. Aarogya setu augments the initiatives of the Government of India by performing the people of their potential risk of COVID -19 infection & the best practices to be followed to stay healthy, as well as providing them relevant & curated medical advisories on the COVID- 19 pandemic. The National Informatics Centre developed it under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
The app is available in 12 languages: English, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Telugu, Odia, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam, and Assamese. All central government officials, including the outsourced workforce, have been directed to download it. On April 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his address to the nation, appealed to the people to download the app. The app reached 100 million installs in 40 days. On May 26, amid growing privacy and security concerns, the source code of the app was made public.
It is a tracking app which uses the Smartphone’s GPS and Bluetooth features to track the coronavirus infection. The app is available for Android and iOS mobile operating systems. With Bluetooth, it tries to determine the risk if one has been near (within six feet of) a COVID-19 – infected person, by scanning through a database of known cases across India. Using this information it determines whether the location one is in belongs to one of the infected areas based on the data available.