india

Updated: Mar 27, 2020 12:41 IST

The Indian government is launching a mobile application named Corona Kavach or ‘Corona Shield’, which will act as a preventive tool to contain the spread of global pandemic coronavirus in the country, by identifying and alerting its users who might have come in contact with an infected person. The application is ready for download in Android-based smartphones and a version for Apple users (IOS platform) is in the works. The app is presently under beta testing.

The application is being developed by the ministry of electronics and could be ready for release soon.

The prime minister had recently offered to share such a virus tracking software with member nations of the SAARC grouping that comprises of India’s eight immediate neighbours of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives and Bangladesh.

Corona Kavach, as the name suggests, will use the location tracking aspect of mobile technology to chart the recent locations visited by any user and if any of those locations match with the location data of positive cases of Covid-19, then it will trigger an alert following which the necessary protocols will kick-in, an abplive.com report said.

The government has fed in the data of all positive cases into the application and it will also help the government agencies track any possible breaches of quarantine by positive or suspected cases.

The app will, however, take care to not reveal the identity of positive cases or of suspects in order to safeguard their privacy and prevent any stigmatisation.

Efforts are on to make the app available in several regional languages apart from Hindi and English.

This app is said to be part of government’s efforts to limit the spread of the viral disease to the next stage by checking community transmissions by keeping a watch on its spread using the location of its users.

The Corona Kavach will have colour coding to indicate the status of users, said the report. It will flash different colours to indicate if a person has never come in contact with a positive case, been in close proximity of a positive case and if has been declared positive.