Former Opposition Leader Ramesh Chennithala alleged that the Kerala Chief Minister’s Office issued a letter seeking the transfer of personal data of those in government service to the Public Relations Department (PRD) for misuse. The Kerala government is currently embroiled in a significant data-misuse controversy involving SPARK (Service and Payroll Administrative Repository for Kerala), the state’s integrated personnel and payroll system. The Kerala High Court has intervened following allegations that the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) accessed the personal data of approximately five lakh government employees, judicial officers, and scheme beneficiaries for political campaigning.
Petitioners alleged that private contact details (mobile numbers and email IDs) stored in the SPARK database—intended strictly for administrative and salary purposes—were used to send unsolicited, personalised WhatsApp messages highlighting government achievements. Notably, those in service—including employees of government-aided private institutions — received personalised messages from the Chief Minister about the 10 per cent dearness allowance hike recently announced by the government. On February 24, the Kerala High Court orally remarked that, prima facie, the bulk messaging sent to government employees and judges through the WhatsApp Business account of the Chief Minister’s Office amounted to an intrusion of privacy.
According to the letter released by Chennithala, Sreeram Sambasiva Rao, Officer on Special Duty to the Chief Minister, sent a letter to Information Kerala Mission (IKM) seeking the transfer of the phone number, age, gender, district, taluk, ward, and local body details of registered users of the K-SMART application in Excel or data-pull format for a “data lake” created by the Public Relations Department.
The letter states that “essential service-related information, target groups and other relevant details from all departments” collected from K-SMART would be used to design a digital communication system named “Centralisation Notification Hub for Government Services”.
It further states that the information was sought to facilitate the delivery of real-time notifications through multiple communication channels, including SMS, email, WhatsApp, and voice/IVR.
In the letter, the OSD asked IKM to transfer the database before February 12. Notably, government employees received personalised messages on their phones only after February 12. However, it remains unclear whether the government used this particular dataset collected from K-SMART to send those messages.