HYDERABAD: Crying foul over the alleged ‘unethical’ practices of Andhra Pradesh government, the Telangana government on Monday approached the cyber crime police with a complaint that the AP government had copied their data supplied for ‘Ease of Doing Business’ (EoDB).
Top officials of the industries department approached the cyber crime police here with a request for filing a case against the AP government for copying their data on EoDB. “It is unethical and unfair to copy our information to get good ranking in EoDB,” a top official, on condition of anonymity, told Express on Monday.
Gujarat secured the first rank, followed by AP. Telangana stood 13th in EoDB rankings given by the World Bank to judge investment-friendly nature of the states.
Telangana, which has been trying hard for the last one year to get good ranking in EoDB, was shocked over the ‘plagiarism’ resorted to by the AP government.
Sources in the industries department explained that the last date for uploading information on the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) website was June 30. However, DIPP gave an additional one week’s time for the states, which could not meet the June 30 deadline, to upload the information.
The Telangana government uploaded its information on June 30 itself and AP uploaded its on July 1 and 2.
When senior officials surfed the DIPP website, they were shocked to learn about ‘plagiarism’ by AP government.
“We have uploaded information on e-filing of commercial courts tracking system. In doing so, our staff member committed a spelling mistake. It was mentioned that the gist of case as ‘filled’. The word should have been ‘filed’ instead of ‘filled’. AP too copied the same and mentioned ‘filled’ instead of filed,” an official in the Telangana industries department explained.
“Not just wrong words, AP copied our reference numbers too,” the official said and provided documentary evidence to Express.
Telangana officials engaged a private vendor to furnish answers provided by the state government and upload it to the DIPP website. The uploading was done from the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) in the city.