India’s Ministry of Home Affairs on April 15, 2020, issued an advisory on the use of the video conferencing app, Zoom, citing security reasons.
Soon after, several posts started making rounds claiming that the Government of India has launched a beta version of a soon-to-be-launched video conferencing app, named “Namaste”.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the above post and found that it is not an official app launched by the Government of India.
Rubbishing the claims, PIB said, “Government has neither launched nor endorsed any video conferencing app.”
We also noted that the Facebook posts claimed that the app name is ‘namaste’ whereas the actual name of the software is ‘Say Namaste’.
We found that the app was launched by Anuj Garg, co-founder and CEO of Inscripts, the company that built ‘Say Namaste’.
“I had posted about publishing a pre-beta version of our own video conferencing app on my personal Facebook account. Overnight, it went viral — we were expecting a few hundred users to test our service, with most being friends and family. Instead, we are now crossing over 500,000 users within just a few days, and our service is still in beta,” Garg told News 18.
The article also stated that ‘Say Namaste’ will be one of the participants in the innovation challenge hosted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). However, it is not a government-endorsed app.
The above information proves that the viral message is misleading and the app is not launched by the Government of India.
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