Army Launches Indian Version of Whatsapp 'SAI' to Prevent Honey Trapping

• SAI is an end-to-end secure voice, text, and video calling services for the Android platform.
• Colonel Sai Shankar, who has developed the application, has won the Defence Minister's accolades.
• The application aims to prevent events like honey trapping by neighboring countries and also to protect confidential information.

The Indian Army has launched an indigenously developed messaging application, like WhatsApp, called the 'Secure Application for Internet (SAI)' to prevent leaking of any classified information to rival countries.

This messaging application supports end-to-end secure voice, text, and video calling services for the Android platform over the Internet. It will be utilized pan-Army to facilitate secure messaging within the service, according to an officer.

SAI was first developed by Colonel Sai Shankar, the commanding officer of a signals unit in Rajasthan. Defense minister Rajnath Singh has also complimented Col Shankar for his skill and ingenuity in developing the application.

"The model is similar to commercially available messaging applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, SAMVAD, and GIMS. SAI scores over on security features with local in-house servers and coding, which can be tweaked as per requirements," the defense ministry said in a release.

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This initiative by the Indian Army can also be seen as a part of the 'Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan.'

The application has been critically examined by CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and Army Cyber Group, and the process for filing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) hosting the infrastructure on NIC and working on the iOS platform is currently in progress.

This development comes after an incident that happened in 2018, where a Group Captain posted at the IAF headquarters in New Delhi had fallen prey to a Pakistani women spy who had virtually 'honey-trapped' him.

In the wake of this, last year the Indian Army had asked its personnel to avoid the use of WhatsApp for official work. It has also asked officers holding sensitive appointments to delete their Facebook accounts. 

There have been several cases of Pakistani women spies trying to virtually honey trap Indian military personnel on Social media to divulge classified information. Therefore this application can prevent such incidents and avoid leaking of any classified information. 

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