Hurdles aplenty for Indian contact tracing app

The government-owned app is supported by the National Informatics Centre and developed by a team of organisations, including NITI Aayog, volunteers from the technology sector (the Ibibo group) and IIT-Madras, which helped conduct a security audit on the app. The Centre has been putting its collective might behind promoting the app, as its efficacy can bear fruit only if at least half of India’s population gets on board and registers as users.

The scope and challenges lying ahead of this exercise are nothing short of gargantuan. For starters, 50 per cent of the country’s 1.3 bn strong population, i.e. 650 mn people need to be onboarded, either in the smartphone avatar of the app or in its feature phone variant, which is on the anvil. As per industry estimates, India’s smartphone user base currently stands at about 500 mn users. This means the app needs to be downloaded by 50 times as many people, as those who have downloaded it over the past two weeks since it was launched. There is also the question of the speed at which the masses adopt the app and consequentially help build the contact tracing network that the government has set its sights on.

The World Health Organization had only last week corrected its report saying there was no community transmission in India and that the country came under the ‘cluster of cases’ category. With the lockdown likely to be extended till the end of the month, and colour codes being assigned to various zones, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had hinted at the possibility of using the app as an e-pass to facilitate travel during this time. China has a similar model in place where users scan codes before boarding buses, trains or entering airports, offices and housing complexes.

But there are concerns regarding state surveillance, privacy, and even human rights violations that are now being raised as countries adopt desperate measures to deal with the pandemic. Last Saturday, South Korea’s Prime Minister said people who violate quarantine orders will be required to wear tracking wristbands. Security experts have also cautioned against using the data collected, for any other purpose apart from health monitoring or COVID-19 contact tracing. Only a few months ago, India’s Personal Data Protection Bill had come under fire for permitting law enforcement agencies to access personal data of users without consent for ‘reasonable purposes.’

For a nation, where arguably more than half the population falls beyond the margins of contact tracing, what the app needs to accomplish must be done in a breathless race against time.