Comment by sharadov

Comment by sharadov 2 days ago

31 replies

Indian government is big on pronouncements.

It will be a garbage app that most likely will not work, considering the historical incompetence of the Indian government's expertise in all things tech.

I am pretty certain Apple and Samsung will pay off someone in the government.

sateesh a day ago

You are confounding intent with the implementation.It might be a garbage app to start with, but there is no opt out for the users. Given the payoff and endless iterations resources will be thrown at it and it would eventually get better.

  • cheema33 a day ago

    > Given the payoff and endless iterations resources will be thrown at it and it would eventually get better.

    Allow the user to download and install it if it turns out to be great. Do not shove things down people's throat against their wishes, like an authoritarian govt. Otherwise you start to resemble Stalin's Soviet Union.

    • vbezhenar a day ago

      Stalin did not force anyone to install apps. He was actually a good ruler. He took over the country with a plough and left it with a nuclear missile.

      • ponector a day ago

        Right! It's a known fact that good rulers are creating death camps, doing multiple acts of genocide and multiple unprovoked military invasions to the neighbors.

        Are saying Kim Jong Un is a good ruler as well? He ruled country during nuclear missile production.

        You should praise Hitler as good ruler as well as stalin.

      • faidit a day ago

        The nuclear missile was developed under Khrushchev, who was actually decent.

        Stalin brought back the Czarist internal passport system, Russian chauvinism, racial discrimination and prison slavery, enriched a new oligarchy, his police killed most of Lenin's politburo and thousands of other good Communists on false charges, and he almost lost Moscow to a fascist incel armed with Panzer IIs, despite the superiority of the Red Army. Also he sold out revolutions in Spain, Greece, China etc. in pursuit of trade deals with capitalist countries that hated the USSR. The great achievements of the Soviet people and their planned economy were made in spite of Stalin's corrupt and oppressive mis-leadership.

        On the matter of India. Stalin also betrayed the Indian revolution by trying to sabotage Bose, ordering the CPI to collaborate with British imperialism, and murdering founders of the CPI like Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Abani Mukherji and GAK Lokhani.

lacy_tinpot 2 days ago

Isn't one of the largest payment processors in the world made by the Indian Government?

Personally I wouldn't risk my personal digital privacy on the incompetence of the government. I'd assume the opposite.

  • aeyes 2 days ago

    Not really, UPI is developed and operated by several large banks.

    Maybe you were thinking about PIX in Brazil which is developed and operated by their central bank.

    • lacy_tinpot 2 days ago

      No. UPI. It's an initiative by the Indian government.

      It's controlled by the RBI, just through a complex public-private corporate structure through NPCI.

      UPI is much larger and more international than PIX. It's currently processing iirc something like 200 billion transactions. UPI is also used in several countries, France being among the most recent examples.

      As such UPI has a broader scope than PIX and requires a public-private corporate structure with stakeholders from both sides.

      But this is off topic. The competence of the Indian government to at the very minimum partner with Industry shows that such software preloaded on phones is a threat to the civil liberties of people that the State shouldn't encroach on. This is a violation of individual privacy.

    • chupchap 2 days ago

      I thought it was made by NPCI, which is owned by RBI, AND the IBA. It is ultimately a government organisation.

      • captn3m0 a day ago

        NPCI ownership is not with RBI and IBA. RBI does not have any NPCI shares.

captn3m0 a day ago

RBI pushed an entire new second level TLD to India’s entire banking system with a 6 month deadline. It was a botched rollout but now every bank in India is using .bank.in, despite two of India’s largest bank owning their own TLDs (.hdfc, and .sbi).

It was a very insecure rollout with zero customer awareness, but it happened and almost every large bank moved. Sometimes silly pronouncements do result in silly change.

blackoil a day ago

not work will also mean it will siphon all the data and then leak it to hackers from around the world.

SanjayMehta 2 days ago

I have this app installed on my phone, and it helped eliminate "digital arrest" scam calls from 5-6 calls per day to maybe one in 2 months.

It makes filing an online complaint against the incoming call almost frictionless.

Having said that, I don't believe it should be shoved down our throats.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_arrest

  • ajyotirmay a day ago

    All that couldn be as simple as educating people that there is no such thing as "digital arrest".

    You are just telling the whole world about the average IQ of an Indian and how they believe in foolish things like "digital arrest".

    And an app doesn't solve that. Digital literacy is a need for today, but the entire country is getting the latest smartphone, with dirt cheap data and zero knowledge of how to operate and own that technology.

    • SanjayMehta a day ago

      And your point is what exactly?

      • Aachen a day ago

        Presumably the point is what they wrote, e.g. "an app doesn't solve that. Digital literacy is a need for today"

        Not saying I agree or disagree but your reply comes across as passive aggressive to me. Not that the parent post makes pleasant insinuations either, to be fair...

  • unmole a day ago

    > I have this app installed on my phone, and it helped eliminate "digital arrest" scam calls from 5-6 calls per day to maybe one in 2 months.

    Yeah, no. Correlation is not causation. Having the app installed doesn't eliminate calls. The app doesn't have the ability to block calls.

    Operators like Airtel stepped up and started flagging spam/scam and now warn their users when they recieve a call from flagged numbers.

    • SanjayMehta a day ago

      How do you think operators built a database of spammers?

      I've been reporting spammers since 2005, since DND rules came into place.

      Only in the last year have I seen the spam slow down. Earlier operators would dismiss the complaint saying to it was a "transactional communication," now it's logged with TRAI and the operator and they have less room to manipulate the complaint.

      • unmole a day ago

        Reports submitted through the new TRAI DND app and Sanchar Sathi are handled identically.

        Simply installing Sanchar Sathi won’t eliminate spam calls, which was my point.

sbmthakur a day ago

I don't think the government is going to treat it like a local district website. IRCTC, UPI, e-Filing portal seem to be working fine for the most part, so pretty sure they can make this work eventually.

  • ajyotirmay a day ago

    IRCTC is a private company. UPI isn't government either. Which e-filling portal is working nicely for you? My ITR was stuck for more than a year because some lame ass dev couldn't show proper error message other than suggesting that something needed to be done by my bank (which wasn't the case and only a year later did I decide to dig into th3 dev tools).

    To praise Indian government is the most unlikely thing one should be doing for their mediocrity at developing things.

    Same is the case with Aadhar, Digiyatra, etc. My government is hella incompetent at safeguarding data and privacy (unless it's their own data). And this app is 100% going to be a huge security hole on every device.

    For me, ADB to the resuce.

ignoramous 2 days ago

> It will be a garbage app that most likely will not work, considering the historical incompetence of the Indian government's expertise in all things tech.

Wait until "they" outsource it (on the pretext of national security interests) to countries that have deep talent in cybersecurity (like the US/Israel/Russia/China).

Ex: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/11/india-orders-new-fig...