India is looking to build its own chat app that will be used by government officials for internal communication. They are also making plans to build email and chat apps that will be made in India for Indians.

The country makes these moves in the hopes of cutting its reliance on foreign companies. This is also a ripple effect on the trade wars going on between the United States and the Chinese tech giant, Huawei.

An Indian government official, in a news report, said they needed to make their communication insular. They believe that the fact that the US put Huawei on the entity list meant that India needed to be on the watch out too.

India has had its own issues with the United States. The Trump-led administration once removed the country from a special trade program. This was the result of a trade tension from India’s failure to grant American access to its markets. The South Asian nation also went ahead to increase the tariffs on some US export products.

India’s Own WhatsApp

For some reason, India has also tried to build its own Linux-based desktop OS called BOSS for a while now. Despite years of effort, it has not been able to get most of its government agencies to switch from Microsoft’s Windows OS.

Before now, France launched a similar initiative. It was an encrypted chat app called Tchap used in government offices. Only people employed by the French government offices used it. However, the app’s code had been open-sourced in a way that would make it visible to the world for audit.

Unfortunately, Tchap has been flawed with some security lapses. It’s interesting that they detected the flaw barely 24 hours upon its release.

China is also another country to restrict foreign company operations. It has, therefore, maintained customised versions of the known Operating Systems for government use. North Korea also has a similar system.