On April 27, MediaNama had interviewed Arnab Kumar, the then Program Director of Frontier Technologies at NITI Aayog, and Rahul Matthan, Partner at Trilegal, about the development of Aarogya Setu. Kumar had spearheaded the Aarogya Setu project at NITI Aayog and Matthan had drafted the app's privacy policy and terms and conditions. MediaNama has been closely following developments around Aarogya Setu since it was launched on April 2, 2020 as India's national contact tracing app. The Central Government made the app mandatory on May 1 but buckled under immense pressure from civil society and the public in general and made it voluntary on May 17. Since then, in every lockdown/unlock guideline, the app has been voluntary.
