The Telangana Chief Election Commissioner C. Sudarshan Reddy told the Central Election Commission (CEC) that the KCR government had seized the voters’ list and misused it for government schemes. He said that the then state government had selected 2.16 lakh pensioners across the state through facial recognition and misused their photos, addresses and other details.
“The KCR government had earlier asked the State Election Commission to link the voter card information with Aadhaar, and for this, the information of the voter identity card holders in your possession should be provided. The Election Commission had given permission for this. This process should be completed through the Election Commission servers. But, contrary to the rules, the IT department used its servers for this. With that, all the information went into the hands of the state government,” the letter revealed.
“From 2015 to July 2021, all the voter card information of the state citizens that was with the Election Commission is with the state government. Later.. the Election Commission ordered that that information not be used. It revoked the permission given. However, the state government kept it with itself. “That’s right.. It was used illegally without informing the CEO. Moreover, it was handed over to private companies to create a software application related to the pension scheme,” the letter states.
All the information collected by the Election Commission from citizens to issue voter identity cards is stored in the Central Election Commission servers. Since it is personal information of the people, special security measures are taken to prevent it from falling into the hands of private individuals and being misused. However, the then KCR government handed over the responsibility of monitoring it to ‘Posidex’, a data mining and data analytics company based in Hyderabad.
This company belongs to the family members of Meeseva Commissioner Gauravalli Venkateswar, who played a key role in the IT department in the previous government. His mother Gauravalli Leela Kumari and younger brother Gauravalli Venugopal are the founders of this company. In fact, the previous government collected information from all government departments under the name of T-App.
The Election Commission has recently stated that the information collected by T-App was combined with voter information collected from the Election Commission to extract the details of pensioners, and this entire process was carried out under the auspices of a private company, Posidex. The KCR government, which came to power for the second time in 2018, was heavily criticized for misusing people’s personal information. The latest EC statement shows that there is truth in that.
