BharOS ready for commercial use, govt depts, pvt sector interested: Prof V Kamakoti, IIT Madras

Several government organizations and private sector enterprises requiring stringent privacy and security are in discussions with IIT Madras’ incubated company JandK Operations to commercially use the BharOS, the first indigenous mobile phone operating system.

“There is a lot of interest among not only in government sectors, but even in private sector organisations. They have shown interest and we are moving towards working with them,” Prof V Kamakoti, director at IIT Madras told Mint in an interaction. IIT Madras’ Pravartak Technologies Foundation, a not-for-profit company established by the institution and funded by the Central government, incubated JandK Operations.

Telecom and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and education minister Dharmendra Pradhan successfully tested the OS on Tuesday by making a video call and an audio call. The indigenous OS is a step in the direction of India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat, where it has focused on localising key industries such as electronics and semiconductors among others. Ensuring data security and privacy for Indians is also among the key pillars of action for the government which is why it is focusing on creating made-in-India hardware through the PLI schemes and now locally made mobile phone software.

The BharOS in effect provides a commercial alternative to global OS’ in the market which is cornered by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. The BharOS launch comes at a time when Android’s monopoly in India, where it has a 95% market share, has been challenged with the competition authority Competition Commission of India imposing a Rs 1337 crore fine on the search giant for exploiting its dominant position and ordered it to remove restrictions on device makers to load apps outside the Google Playstore. Google has since said it is working with CCI to change the way it markets the app store.

“As a country we are looking for an Indian mobile operating system which is also a secure operating system. This essentially means it executes only authorised software on it. If even a small change to that authorised software, the system should not execute it. Through such a high assurance, we can control malware and other privacy/security compromising actions. IIT Madras and IIT Madras incubated companies have been working on it for quite some time,” Kamakoti said.

He added that the next step would be to enable organisations to set up their own app stores and give them control on permitting the apps that go on the phones. This would be part of the commercial launch of the OS, even though it would be available for a closed or captive group of users.

“Interested organisations can install BharOS on devices provided to their employees and we will also provide them a private app store where the organisation will have control on the apps that can be uploaded on the app store. So, only the apps from that private store will work, others will not. This is a scalable model, can be done for any size of the organisation starting from 100 employees, to thousands or crores,” he said.

BharOS is hardware agnostic and is available for handset vendors to install on their devices for commercial use, and could be scaled up for use of millions of people across the country.

“It can be done on any commercial phone, provided the handset vendor gives us the development manuals and some features. This is not just about porting an operating system, but it is about porting a complete secure stack on a handset,” he said.