No Arogya Setu data of Kerala was shared with US tech firm, IT Minister tells Congress MP

By Payal Mehta

New Delhi [India], March 16 : In a written reply to Congress Lok Sabha MP Hibi Eden on whether the Centre responded to the incident in which a US-based tech firm was authorised by the Kerala government to collate, collect, and manage and handle health data of people, Union Minister of State for Information and Technology, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, on Wednesday said no data pertaining to Kerala was shared with the US tech company.

"We are not aware of any such incident in which a US-based tech firm was authorised by the Kerala government to collate, collect, manage and handle the health data of the people. Neither was any reference made by the Kerala government in this regard as well," he said.

To another question from the MP on whether the data collected by Aarogya Setu till May 10, 2022, was deleted in accordance with the Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, Chandrasekhar said, "The data has been deleted in accordance with the protocol."

"In accordance with the provisions of the Aarogya Setu Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, the contact tracing feature of the Aarogya Setu mobile application has been discontinued," the MoS, IT said in response to the Congress MP, who wanted to know if there was a demand to share the contact tracing data collected through the Aarogya Setu mobile application.

Aarogya Setu is an Indian Covid-19 contact tracing, syndromic mapping and self-assessment digital service, primarily a mobile application, developed by the National Informatics Centre under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The app logged more than 100 million downloads within 40 days of its launch in April 2020, during the first Covid wave in India.