“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the floods leads to fortune,” penned Shakespeare in Julius Caesar. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan reached his ‘floods’ moment when Covid-19 struck his State ahead of all others. He rose to the occasion and managed it well by building on the legacies of egalitarianism.

With his exemplary work and transparency, he managed the pandemic well. All details were published on a daily basis on the government website. He rolled out a comprehensive Rs 20,000- crore economic package even before the Union government declared a lockdown. The muchacclaimed success of the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front government of Vijayan did not bring tidings of joy to the rival Congress-led United Democratic Front.

Election to the Kerala Assembly is due in less than a year. In the normal course, it is the turn of the UDF to form the next government in Kerala. After experimenting with different combinations and permutations, the people of Kerala have settled on alternating between the LDF and the UDF every five years.

The unexpected shine on the LDF government in its penultimate stage brought about by Vijayan has unnerved Congress leaders in the State. The Kerala government’s contract with Sprinklr, a New York-based IT company run by a Malayalee, to analyse Kerala’s Covid-19 data had come in handy.

Ramesh Chennithala, leader of the Opposition in Kerala and presumptive chief ministerial candidate of the Congress, has accused Vijayan of opening the door for US-based Sprinklr to exploit personal health data of Keralites for profit. He pegged value of the private medical information of an individual at Rs 10,000.

Sprinklr has been supplied with the medical data of about 175,000 people of Kerala, he alleged. According to the Kerala government, the physical storage of the data is still within India. It was shared with Sprinklr only for analytic purposes to mitigate the effects of Covid- 19. Sprinklr would erase the data after analysing it as there will be no other use for it.

Chennithala and BJP State president K Surendran have approached the Kerala High Court seeking a directive to the government to stop uploading data of Covid-19 patients on the server of Sprinklr. A Division Bench of the High Court has directed the State government to anonymise the data and allow Sprinklr to access the data only after the process is completed.

The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, is yet to be passed by Parliament. According to Section 12(1)(e) of the Bill, personal data may be processed by the government to provide medical treatment or health services to any individual during an epidemic, outbreak of disease or any other threat to public health.

Section 34 of the Bill says sensitive personal data may be transferred outside India with one condition ~ that such data shall continue to be stored in India. Vijayan has not violated any existing or proposed law on data sharing. Will the combined campaign of the opposition parties against Vijayan tarnish the image of his government?