Leader of the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) Opposition in Kerala Ramesh Chennithala on Thursday accused Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan of having opened the door for the U.S.-based firm Sprinklr to exploit the personal health information of Keralites for profit.
Mr. Chennithala alleged that Mr. Vijayan had misused the political heft of his office to muscle through the contentious decision to allow field health workers to use the digital repositories owned by Sprinklr to store the sensitive medical information they collected from nearly 1.75 lakh persons under observation for COVID-19 symptoms in Kerala.
Mr. Chennithala said Ernst and Young had pegged the value of the private medical information of an individual at ₹10,000. Forbes valued it at ₹75,000. By a conservative estimate, Sprinklr held medical information worth ₹700 crore. It could easily palm off the data to private players in the pharmaceutical and health sector without the consent of the government or citizens.
He said Sprinklr entered the fray by offering Kerala a free mobile phone application for field health workers to channel the data they collected from COVID-19 vulnerable persons to the firm’s servers sited in the U.S.
The Chief Minister “strong-armed” the IT department into accepting the deal without consulting the Cabinet or vetting Sprinklr’s business pitch, Mr. Chennithala alleged.
‘Free deal’
He said the government had fashioned the surreptitious deal to accord undue pecuniary advantage to Sprinklr. The agreement lacked any clause to protect the health data of citizens. The “free deal” offered by Sprinklr had come at a high cost to the State. Kerala could challenge any potential data breach by the company only in a court in New York. Moreover, it had to pay for the services offered by Sprinklr from September, he said.
Mr. Chennithala said Sprinklr had wrongly claimed in an advertisement film that it had provided the IT backbone that helped Kerala tide over natural calamities and outbreaks. IT secretary M. Shivsankar, who acted in the advertisement, endorsed the view. Sprinklr now used the film to sell its services to other governments.
Mr. Chennithala also accused Mr. Vijayan of having kept the public in the dark about the deal. The CM should state whether he knew Sprinklr was a “blacklisted firm” fighting a data theft case filed by a former partner in the U.S.
Mr. Vijayan had dismissed the Opposition’s allegations as “false” on Wednesday. He said the government had harnessed the IT resources of the private firm for free.
