CMO won’t send out bulk messages till Monday, govt assures Kerala HC

Kochi: The state govt on Friday assured the high court that its earlier undertaking to refrain from disseminating bulk messages from the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) would continue till next Monday.Advocate general K Gopalakrishna Kurup, appearing on behalf of the govt, made the assurance to HC in a petition challenging the bulk messaging campaign undertaken by CMO to govt employees ahead of the assembly elections by allegedly accessing private data provided for crediting their monthly salaries. Recording the submission, the bench of Justice Bechu Kurian Thomas adjourned the petition filed by P Rasheed Ahamed, associate professor at KTM College, Malappuram, and K M Anil Kumar, an employee of the department of general administration, Thiruvananthapuram, to March 2.The petitioners primarily alleged that the state sent these messages highlighting the achievements of the LDF govt to govt employees and judges using private data, including mobile numbers, accessed from information furnished by them for crediting their monthly salaries in the Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala (SPARK) software, without their consent. According to them, this constitutes data leakage and intrusion into the privacy of citizens.On Friday, they filed an interlocutory application (IA) placing additional documents on record, including communications allegedly sent by Seeram Sambasiva Rao, officer on special duty at the CMO, to the LSGD seeking the latest data on registered users of the K-SMART application and beneficiaries of the ‘Sthree Suraksha Padhathi'. They also sought a direction to the govt to make available communications issued to all departments in a similar manner, to ascertain the extent of any alleged data leakage. The petitioners further alleged that a meeting was convened with a private party in Mumbai, for entrusting the data.Meanwhile, the state govt filed a counter-affidavit stating that no data has been transferred to any entity outside the govt and that the processing and handling of data occurred strictly within the govt framework and through the Kerala State IT Mission (KSITM), the designated nodal agency for all e-governance-related activities. There has been no data breach, no illegal transfer of data, and no unauthorised disclosure, the affidavit stated.It asserted that the messages from CM addressed to govt employees regarding the grant of arrears of dearness allowance (DA) and other benefits cannot be termed political in nature but form part of governance. The affidavit also claimed that assembly elections have not been declared, nor has the model code of conduct come into force. In such circumstances, linking the govt's executive action with the elections is unsustainable in law and on facts.