After years of contemplation and controversies, the Indian government is finally testing not one, but two messaging platforms for its internal communication. Sandes and Samvad are two apps that have been built by different departments of the government and are currently being tested before a final rollout happens. The idea, according to people in the know, is to have a secure instant messaging system for government use, and not rely on external, especially foreign owned apps such as WhatsApp, Signal and so on. Sandes is being developed by the National Informatics Centre, the technology infrastructure arm of the government under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). Sandes is available for download in the Apple App Store, but seems to have been taken off the Google Play Store after being available there for a few days.