THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: More than a month has passed since a two-member committee submitted its report on the hiring of Sprinklr, a US firm, to manage Covid-19 data. Yet the government appears to be delaying its release. Bureaucratic sources said Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s advisers fear the report’s release before the elections would be a setback to the government though it has nothing against it.
The panel — comprising M Madhavan Nambiar, former civil aviation secretary and IT special secretary, and Gulshan Rai, former national cyber security coordinator -— had submitted their detailed report on October 22.
The duo was appointed on April 20 to probe three aspects: whether the privacy of 1.8 lakh citizens has been adequately protected, whether there has been any procedural lapse while finalising the agreement with Sprinklr Inc and whether deviations, if any, were fair, justified and reasonable considering the predicament the state was facing.
Even Chief Secretary Vishwas Mehta is learnt to have suggested making the committee’s 21-page findings public. “Gulshan Rai is a legal as well as technology expert. The Sprinklr committee came up with a foolproof report and it has nothing against the state government except for M Sivasankar’s procedural lapse in not taking the cabinet and the law department into confidence.
"Advisers are only giving the advice that Pinarayi Vijayan wishes to hear,” a senior government official told TNIE on condition of anonymity. With the government now appointing a three-member committee, the bureaucratic circles are surprised as the terms of reference are the same for both committees.
Officials feel, if the report was released, the government could have “cut corners”, citing the Disaster Management Act. “Out of a population of 3 crore, the health details of 1.8 lakh people were sent to the server of Sprinklr. There was no breach of data and there was no money involved,” said a top government official.