Kerala govt releases deal document with US firm ‘Sprinklr’ relating to COVID-19 data

Thiruvananthapuram: Stung by the onslaught of the Congress-led opposition over the handing over of data of COVID-19 suspects to US-based PR and marketing firm Sprinklr, Kerala government on Wednesday released the deal document. In the agreement, it is said that the final decision on the data vests with the citizen and it will not be misused.

The details of the deal have been released through the website. The agreement signed on April 2 will expire on September 24. According to the deal, data can be collected from March 25 to September 24. Earlier, a letter sent by Sprinkler to the IT Secretary also mentioned data privacy.

With controversies surfacing day by day, the government had decided not to upload COVID-19 data to Sprinkler’s website. Panchayat secretaries were instructed to upload data only to government website which was not the case earlier. The earlier order had asked panchayat secretaries to upload data also to Sprinkler’s website.

Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala had first raised this issue on Saturday and then Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had said the company belongs to a Keralaite and he came forward with the offer to help and that the state government was not paying anything to this company, while even the WHO is using this data.

Since then, Chennithala has been coming out against this data trade off and joining him in this have been former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, state Congress chief Mullapally Ramachandran and several Congress and UDF leaders, who have all pointed out that this was a shady deal and they wanted CM to come clean on it.

The Congress had alleged that IT Secretary M Sivasankar has even appeared in the video put out by the US-based firm.