India Plans on Building its own Chat App for Official Use After Huawei U.S. Ban
A report from Economic Times has revealed that the Indian government is looking forward to bring an official messenger or chat app, similar to Whatsapp, to be used by the government employees for official communications.
According to the report, the Delhi government said on Thursday that it is considering to develop a chat application, email, and the other homegrown secure communication networks, for the government officials, in order to insulate the intimate communication with one another.
The decision has come as one of the results of the U.S. government banning Huawei and some other Chinese companies from operating in the country, due to the friction with Beijing. In fact, Washington has recently set up the sanctions against many Chinese companies, which the U.S. tech giants, like Google and Facebook, have already started working upon.
Also, there has been some cold vibes between the U.S. government and the Indian government, as result of removal of the South Asian nation from a special trade program by the U.S. government, as India could not assure the U.S. president Donald Trump of India “providing equitable and reasonable access to its markets” to the U.S.
This incident has caused tension among the two nations. “Tomorrow, if the U.S. finds us unreliable for some reason, all they need to do is ask their companies to slow down networks in India, and everything here will come to a standstill. We are vulnerable, and we must take steps to cover that,” an unnamed official said over the matter.
Though it will be the first time that Indian government will be taking an initiative in developing mediums for the messaging and emails for the official communication, it is not the first time that any other nation is building such software for the government-only use.
At the beginning of this year, France released its official chat app, named Tchap, an open source app, which can only be used by France’s government officials. Other than France, there are nations like China and North Korea, that have got their own operating systems for use in government offices.
Even the Indian government has attempted on building its own Linux-based desktop operating system named BOSS, but with least success, Microsoft‘s Windows is still the most common OS in the government offices of India.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.