Contact tracing feature of Aarogya Setu disabled, data deleted: Govt

The contact tracing feature of the Aarogya Setu app has been disabled and the contact tracing data collected to locate potential cases of Covid-19 through the app has been deleted, the minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar informed Parliament on Wednesday.

In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Chandrasekhar said that as per the protocol decided by the empowered group on May 11, 2020, officials of the Union and state health and family welfare ministry, the national and state disaster management authorities and district civil surgeons were given access to the data collected through the Aarogya Setu.

He was responding to a question raised by Congress MP Amar Singh.


The Empowered Group on Technology and Data Management – the competent authority to extend the protocol – was dissolved in September 2020.

ET had reported in July 2022 that the government had discontinued Aarogya Setu’s data access and sharing protocol with an aim to convert the contact tracing app into a ‘national health app’. A spokesperson for National Informatics Center (NIC) which designed Aarogya Setu had said that the protocol was discontinued because “it had lost its relevance”.

Aarogya Setu was an Indian Covid-19 contact-tracing, syndromic mapping and self-assessment digital service, developed by the NIC under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) primarily as a mobile app. The app reached more than 100 million downloads within 40 days of launch.

Soon after it was launched in 2020, the government’s decision to make Aarogya Setu mandatory was challenged in the Kerala High Court and in the Karnataka High Court. In the affidavit filed in the Karnataka High Court, the central government had said that the data access and sharing protocol forms the legal basis for any collection, processing, and storage of data that happens through the app.