Scindia unveils India’s sovereign govt-to-citizen messaging platform ‘Bharat Sandesh’
New Delhi, Oct 10 (IANS) Communications Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has unveiled ‘Bharat Sandesh’ — a sovereign government-to-citizen rich-messaging platform which is built on BSNL’s network and powered by the ViH Messenger software development kit (SDK).
The platform lets government departments reach citizens with verified, rich, regional-language messages over infrastructure that India owns and governs.
The platform, built by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and ViH Metaverse, was launched at the BSNL pavilion during the ‘India Mobile Congress 2026’ here.
Government messages to citizens today travel largely over platforms owned and run abroad.
Bharat Sandesh changes that. Every message, and the data and metadata behind it, stays inside Indian jurisdiction, hosted on Indian infrastructure and subject to Indian law.
“Every citizen should be able to tell, at a glance, that a message is really from their government, and every department should know that no decision made in a foreign boardroom can stop it reaching them. That is what Bharat Sandesh is for,” said Soumadri Sen, Founder and CEO, ViH Metaverse Pvt Ltd.
Citizens get “verified sender badges, so a genuine scheme alert can be told from a scam at a glance. Rich messages with images, documents, and interactive cards in place of bare SMS text. Delivery and read receipts. Delivery in regional languages. For BSNL subscribers, access is built into the Selfcare experience,” according to a statement.
Notably, the government gets a single, auditable channel for departments and PSUs to broadcast verified communication at national scale, replacing fragmented SMS gateways and third-party bulk-messaging vendors.
India built UPI so that the rails carrying its payments would be its own. Bharat Sandesh applies the same logic to messaging: the revenue earned from carrying India’s government messages stays in India and builds an Indian industry, said the statement.
–IANS
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