Twitter to Koo and now Whatsapp to Sandes! Aatmanirbhar govt gets Sandes as a pick to Whatsapp!

New Delhi, February 19: Holding onto the data and privacy concerns of Whatsapp, the Government of India on Thursday launched Sandes, an instant messaging service. The app has been developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) under the government’s Digital India venture. The instant messaging app falls under the Government Instant Messaging System (GIMS) and can be used by any government official or the general public.

 

 

Sandes means message in Hindi and is based on the GIMS that’s developed by the NIC. A need was being felt within the government for a very long time to have India's own, independent and self-owned instant messaging service. Development of these apps however had began way before the present WhatsApp controversy.

 

 

Sandes is essentially the government’s answer to WhatsApp and more such platform that has been marred in controversy over its privacy policy. Nevertheless, Sandes claims that personal and group conversations remain end-to-end encrypted and that the system cannot read any messages exchanged by users.

 

 

Most of the feature set offered by Sandes mirror those we have been using on WhatsApp, Telegram and the likes. Users can talk to their friends, family and share images, videos, GIFs and more with each other. Apart from that, the app is also integrated with DigiLocker which is capable of storing any PDF files received in Sandes.

 

With Sandes, the government says is safeguarding people’s personal data by keeping it inside the country as opposed to global players that often use it for targeting advertisements. Interestingly, Sandes has an admin portal that the NIC may also use for administration and monitoring of the platform. Currently, the app supports non-official groups with 50 members, official groups with 100 users and 10 contacts in the broadcast list at a time.