BharOS: IIT-developed India's new operating system tested

Union Ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Ashwini Vaishnaw on Tuesday successfully tested “BharOS”, an indigenous operating system developed by IIT Madras, and hailed its benefits.

“Poor people 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 Pvt Ltd (JandKops), which has been incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

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The system can be installed on commercial off-the-shelf handsets.

BharOS services

BharOS services are currently 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.

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

(With Agency inputs)