The two-member expert panel constituted to look into the Kerala government’s controversial deal with Sprinklr Inc. has, according to a Manorama News report, said that the deal was struck without taking the Law Department’s counsel and revealed that the company had access to the personal data of 1.8 lakh people.
The two-member panel, with the former Chief of National Cybersecurity Gulshan Rai and former Civil Aviation Secretary M Madhavan Nambiar as members, submitted its report to the government on October 21, 10 days after the deadline of October 10.
The first charge that the IT Department, then headed by the Chief Minister’s former secretary M Sivasankar, had not taken the Law Department into confidence was accepted by the government right at the start of the controversy.
The government’s reasoning, articulated by Sivasankar himself, was that it would have been self-defeating to take the usual long-winding bureaucratic route during a time of an unprecedented public health emergency. “Even a day’s delay would have been fatal,” the government had said in the High Court in April.
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