The list of infected patients comes from testing labs—not self-reporting by patients.
“We built this in two weeks," Kumar said. “We want this app to be the one-stop-shop for all covid related tech. Tomorrow, say, we have to integrate telemedicine, or schedule testing, or predict and find out where the disease could travel, this app could be developed to serve as the solution," Kumar said. “In that sense, we have just seeded the first version of building a digital health stack for the country."
Several organizations came forward to support the initiative. Apple generally takes a week to upload the app on the App Store. Aarogya Setu was approved in three hours. Google Play did it in an hour. The app is prominently promoted on Paytm’s app. Gaana sent notifications to its users. HDFC Bank sent text-message alerts. Schools wrote to kids. Ministers promoted it on Twitter. All with the same message: a request to install the app.
Within a week of its 2 April launch, the app has got over 20 million unique users. But questions about effectiveness and privacy were inevitable.
What percentage of the population, for example, needs to use the app for it to be effective? Estimates vary. A review of multiple studies puts the range at 40-70% of the population. It is difficult for India to reach that scale at a national level as India doesn’t have that level of smartphone penetration.
According to the India Internet 2019 report by IAMAI and Nielsen, 385 million Indians over the age of 12—around 36% of the population—have access to the internet. Smartphone usage is likely to be lower than that figure (there are no official numbers). Moreover, the access is not uniform. There is a wide disparity by geography (51% in urban areas can access the internet but only 27% in rural) and by state (69% in Delhi to 25% in Odisha).
That means, even if every Indian with access to a smartphone instals the app, and keeps their Bluetooth and GPS location on all the time, around two-thirds of Indians will still be left out.
“We are now actively thinking about how to extend the functionality to feature phones which don’t have in-built Bluetooth technology," Kumar said. Feature phones can be tracked through location data captured through telephone towers, but it is not precise. It also leads into a vortex of privacy concerns.
“The lockdown has bought us some time to think of those solutions and we are figuring out what we can do," Kumar said.
Practical challenges
The practical challenges in ensuring mass adoption of a citizen-facing app is why the Maharashtra government took another route.
Amit Kothawade, who works with Maharashtra State Innovation Society—one of the six organizations that came together to build Mahakavach—said that they studied the apps built in Singapore and South Korea and realized that cultural factors won’t allow those models to succeed in India.
“In Singapore, when you ask people to isolate, they follow it. In India, they don’t," he said, referring to the incidents where people were found to escape quarantines. “Indians would not be willing to support such initiatives or be open to do so voluntarily."
People fleeing quarantine—for whatever reason—endangers other people around them and increases the risk of community transmission. That’s the argument governments are using to exert coercive power and engage in intrusive Big Brother-style surveillance.
The Maharashtra app’s design shows the state has minimal trust on the citizens. Every person under home quarantine is required to install the app to help the state administration monitor them effectively. The platform allows the home quarantines to be restricted in a digitally-mapped area—a technique called geo-fencing. They are monitored through their phone’s location data and authorities are alerted in case the phone leaves the boundary. That in itself is not enough, the government believes. What if people leave the phone and roam around? That is why users are required to provide regular updates to authorities via selfie-attendance. Even that is not enough. What if they click and send old photos? So the app software uses facial recognition technologies to detect live images.
For tracing contacts of infected patients, Mahakavach extracts data from a user’s Google Maps Timeline, a feature that stores the entire location history of a user captured by Google’s services like on the Android smartphone—and serves as a constant reminder of ubiquitous corporate surveillance. “The user shares the information with consent to help the authorities in tracing contacts," Kothawade explained.
A pilot of the app is running in Nasik district and the project team is hoping for a state-level scale up soon, Kothawade said.
While the material goal of both Aarogya Setu and Mahakavach is to fight the pandemic, the philosophical difference could not be more different. Mahakavach is built on a social contract where the state believes that citizens can’t be trusted while the success of Aarogya Setu is fundamentally dependent on the citizens trusting the state, installing the app and sharing sensitive data. Which way will India go in the weeks ahead?
New normal
Critics have raised legitimate concerns about how state authorities can use the current crisis to expand mass surveillance under the guise of public health—and such structures would then continue to exist after the crisis. This is especially so given the experience in authoritarian regimes like China where part of the success in curbing the spread of the disease was credited to intrusive surveillance tactics.
“Research done by our group and others shows that it is possible to consider privacy-first solutions and still provide nearly all the functionalities," said Raskar, the MIT Media Lab professor who also served on the core advisory teams of Mahakavach and Aarogya Setu.