The usage of contact-tracing applications has been synonymous with ensuring one's health security and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. These contact-tracing apps have been scripted differently by each country, within design choices of centralized vs. decentralized architecture, closed vs. open-source protocol and collecting location vs. proximity data features. The distinct script of contact-tracing apps caters to the contextual background of each country with a presupposition about on-ground and consistent usage of the app. The article explores the ways in which citizens in India negotiate the usage of the Aarogya Setu digital contact-tracing app. It reveals citizens' on-ground practices of adopting or evading the app usage, besides reflecting on the broader institutional shortcomings that shape the scepticism towards technological solutionism in critical health exigencies. Three such practices are identified and thematically presented as resistance by early deletion, resistance by selective adoption and constrained adoption. The findings steer concerns regarding user-friendly designs and revisiting governance structures before deploying any technological solutionism by the state. Here, the paper attempts to reverse the gaze and explore how citizens'(in)effective adoption of the Aarogya Setu app not only responds but also challenges the norm of digital contact-tracing solutionism.
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A surfeit of expeditious measures to sustain a prompt and tangible record of the spread of the novel “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2) virus fuelled many technological solutions worldwide. Internationally, the World Health Organization (WHO) steered countries by explicating the four pillars of testing, isolation, tracing, and treatment during the pandemic (Lacina Citation2020). Concomitantly, the unforeseeable sweep of the virus and the public fluster justified legislative actions to precipitate a nationwide lockdown and adopt self-assessment contact-tracing applications (hereafter, app) in India. In line with the strategy of “test, track, and trace”(Lacina Citation2020), the contact-tracing apps deployed as a technological response to the pandemic primarily aid in “syndromic mapping” and logically flatten the curve through path tracing and movement patterns of COVID-19 positive patients (Iyengar et al. Citation2021). Not long ago, the practice of contact tracing and control measures was revamped during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-1) epidemic in 2002 (Ferretti et al. Citation2020), and the successful curb of the Nipah outbreak in Kerala in 2019 became emblematic of the method of intensive precautionary isolation and timely contact tracing to combat transmission of epidemics (Wilson et al. Citation2020)
