Union ministers test 'BharOS' operating system developed by IIT-Madras

Union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Ashwini Vaishnaw successfully tested "BharOS", an indigenous operating system developed by IIT Madras, on Tuesday.

"Poor people of the country will be the main beneficiary of a strong, indigenous, dependable and self-reliant digital infrastructure. 'BharOS' is a successful step towards data privacy," Pradhan said.

BharOS was developed by JandK Operations Private Limited (JandKops), which has been incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

The system can be installed on commercial off-the-shelf handsets. BharOS services are currently being provided to organisations that have stringent privacy and security requirements and whose users handle sensitive information that requires confidential communications on restricted apps on mobiles.

Such users require access to private cloud services through private 5G networks.

BharOS comes with no default apps. This means that users are not forced to use apps that they may not be familiar with or that they may not trust.

Additionally, this approach allows users to have more control over the permissions that apps have on their device, as they can choose to only allow apps that they trust to access certain features or data on their device.