Back to College: Students and staff will now have to download Aarogya Setu app

The Ministry of Electronics or the National Informatics Centre may not know about how or by whom the Aarogya Setu App was created, but the University Grants Commission actively encourages the students to download it, in its guidelines for reopening colleges and universities.

The 18-page-long document, that was released by the regulator on November 5, following the latest Unlock guidelines, mentions the mobile application four times in total. It asks the students, faculty and college staff to download the app, as the students begin to return to universities. 'Installation and use of Aarogya Setu App shall be advised wherever feasible', reads a pointer in the 'COVID-19 appropriate behaviour' section. It also asks the parents of the students to advise their wards to download and use the app.

An open-source contact tracing app, Aarogya Setu was released on April 2, 2020, after India went under a lockdown. However, on October 28, Live Law reported that that the Central Information Commission had asked the NIC to explain that when in the Aarogya Setu website it is mentioned that the platform was designed, developed and hosted by it, then how is it that it doesn't have any information about the creation of the App. Disposing off an RTI, the NIC had said that "does not hold the information" relating to the App's creation.