The Kerala government has told the state high court that the law allows the head of a department to buy a product without seeking legal opinion if it costs below Rs 15,000.
The controversy relates to Kerala’s IT department procuring a smart tool from US company Sprinklr that helps structure data collated from social media, email and phone calls to track the possible spread patterns of Covid-19 and identify vulnerable populations.
Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan has defended the move saying Sprinklr had offered the data analytics service free of cost since its founder and CEO Ragy Thomas is a native of Kerala.
However, the Opposition Congress and the BJP have alleged data privacy breach and irregularities, highlighting that no clearance had been sought from the law and finance departments.
A lawyer last week petitioned Kerala High Court challenging the deal and seeking a halt to its operation.
The state pleader submitted the government’s written response on Wednesday, explaining: “The head of the administrative department has the full authorisation for issuance of a purchase order for goods or services with price less than Rs 15,000.”
The petitioner had questioned the logic of procuring a big data analytics tool citing Kerala’s low Covid-19 counts, which on Thursday stood at 447 cases, including 316 recoveries and two deaths.
The state explained that one key reason it had bought the smart tool was a forecast from Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University that 80 lakh of Kerala’s 3.5 crore people could get infected between March 28 and April 25.
“It is too early to conclude that the worst phase of Covid-19 pandemic is over,” it added, citing the example of Singapore which recorded about 6,000 new cases over the past week after a lull.
It rebutted the allegation that the government IT centres would have been able to handle the data, saying none of them had the expertise Sprinklr offered.
“The government owned/ controlled entities like C-DIT (Centre for Development of Imaging Technology) and Information Kerala Mission are not technically equipped to manage such large volume of data and hence there was no viable alternative within the government framework,” the state told the court.
It said: “The issue had to be resolved in the shortest possible time and the circumstances necessitated extraordinary steps on behalf of the government.”
The government argued that the usual process of floating tenders and inviting bids would have delayed the purchase by at least two weeks.
It also dealt with the data privacy breach allegations, which are based on the fact of the data being initially hosted on Sprinklr servers. The government said the servers used by the State Data Centre were not compatible with the Sprinklr tool.
It explained that the SDC had a VM Ware server, which was not compatible with the Sprinklr tool, which needs an Amazon Web Services server.
While the C-DIT had an Amazon server, the space was not sufficiently large to accommodate the huge data that were to be stored.
After the Congress accused the state of selling the data for Rs 200 crore to Sprinklr, however, the state IT department got the C-DIT to buy fresh server space to accommodate the data.
Now the data are hosted on a C-DIT server in Mumbai but Kerala has to pay Rs 1.24 crore a year for the server space, against the free space offered by Sprinkler.
On the issue of data privacy and ownership, the state said: “The government has now full and exclusive ownership of the data and for analysis of the data.”
The petitioner had questioned the logic of allowing the legal jurisdiction as New York, as mentioned in the contract. This has been a contentious point politically.
But the state cited Section 75 of the IT Act to argue that since the data were now being hosted in India, any breach of contract abroad could be challenged under Indian laws.
The hearing is scheduled on Friday.
