The organisations would be able to keep an eye on the health status of their employees.

Ministry of Electronics and IT on Saturday opened Aarogya Setu’s application programming interface (API) for businesses with more than 50 employees “to check the status of Aarogya Setu and integrate it into its various work-from-home features,” the ministry said in a statement. The organisations would be able to keep an eye on the health status of their employees or any other user who provide consent to share his/her health status with them. Open API, also known as public API, is available publicly to software developers to help application programmes interact with each other and share data.

The API would be available only for businesses registered in India and shall provide only the Aarogya Setu status and name of the Aarogya Setu User given the user has provided consent for it. “No other personal data shall be provided through the API,” the ministry said.

Aarogya Setu app was launched on April 2, 2020, to help contract tracing of Covid positive patients. The ministry said that the app is now the most downloaded contact tracing app in the world with over 15 crore users even as more than 6.6 million Bluetooth contacts have been traced and “percentage positive of those who have tested is almost 27 per cent.” Hence, the Bluetooth contact tracing and testing are very efficient and effective, the ministry said.

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Moreover, the app’s (IT-enabled lntegrated Hotspot Analysis System (ITIHAS) interface using location data and the app’s analytics to locate new hotspots at sub-Pincode levels has helped the government in taking precautionary steps. The government said that over 30,000 hotspots were identified “at a very granular level of 300 m X 300 m and shared with state governments and districts.” The Government had in May said that it would Rs 4 lakh in cash to those who would find bugs in Aarogya Setu or help improve the app as part of its Bug Bounty Programme to partner with security researchers and developers to test how secure is the app and also to boost its security.