Following the violent clash between India and China, the Indian government banned as many as 59 Chinese applications including TikTok. Several popular applications including Shareit, Helo, Likee, WeChat, UC Browser, Shein have been mentioned among the list of banned Chinese apps.
This major move is aimed at safeguarding the interests of crores of Indian mobile and internet users. This important decision is a targeted move to ensure complete safety and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace, the Ministry of Information Technology added in a notification.
The government revealed that it has received many complaints from several sources including several reports about misuse of some mobile applications available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and secretively transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India.
The decision of banning Chinese apps was taken in the wake of India-China border standoff. The government banned the apps in order to protect the sovereignty of Indian Cyberspace and to ensure the interests of crores of Indian mobile users.
Several people including National Commission for Women (NCW) chief Rekha Sharma have welcomed the Modi government’s decision and thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for banning 59 Chinese apps including TikTok while this news came as a shock to many.
Now, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s son Tejashwi Yadav has criticized the Modi government’s decision of banning TikTok. He said that many youths have lost their jobs after India banned TikTok.
“I was very sad when TikTok was banned, then I created an account on Likee app, but that too was taken down,” said Yadav.
This decision came at a time when India is already going through a bad patch due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The decision was taken by the central government in the wake of the recent clash between Indian and Chinese troops in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley.
According to Tejashwi, the move will affect jobs in India. The Chinese app TikTok was extremely popular in India and had around 12 crore active users. Notably, when TikTok app was blocked in India for a week in 2019, ByteDance had said in a court filing that it was losing more than $5,00,000 (9Rs 3.7 Crore) a day in the nation. ByteDance is the company which has developed TikTok.
According to a report, Indian users spent over 5.5 billion (550 Crore) hours on TikTok which was the most popular app in the country.
