Kochi: The alleged transgressions of Kerala bureaucrat M Sivasankar don't include just aiding or abetting a powerful gold smuggling racket, but the ongoing investigations have exposed his nepotistic appointments for technical projects in the Kerala High Court.

The head of the ‘high-level IT team’ in the High Court was an officer who had worked in the state IT Mission under Sivasankar, the former Principal Secretary of the IT department.

The person was appointed at a monthly salary of Rs 1 lakh for the post of Technical Project Manager, the qualifications for which were also suggested by Sivasankar.

He also suggested the qualifications for the positions of software technical lead, lead software developer and senior system engineer in the same team, reveals an inquiry held to ascertain the current status of the IT appointments made in the High Court on the basis of the instructions from the suspended bureaucrat.

The inquiry on the appointment of the IT team was held on the directions of the Chief Justice and a status report on the findings has been prepared by Justice A Mohammad Mushtaq.

Unusual note

The appointments commenced after the High Court registrar-general contacted the IT department a couple of years ago. The inquiry revealed that the High Court had received a letter and a set of instructions from Sivasankar's under secretary K K Balagopal on August 13, 2018 in response to the letter from the registrar-general. The latter received an unusual note also with this letter. It stated that the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the central government agency responsible for computerisation of high courts in the country, lacked the competency to help the high court with IT-related matters!

With this, the NIC senior technical director, who was present at the initial discussions of the project, was excluded from the follow-up discussions. Sivasankar personally participated in the three discussions held in the meantime.

On the instructions of Sivasankar, two IT experts from the state government were included in the three-member interview board that completely excluded NIC representatives, states the report by High Court Judge A Mohammad Mushtaq.

As reported the other day the report states that Sivasankar had recommended Government IT Park CEO Rishikesh R Nair and International Centre for Free and Open Source Software director Dr Jayashankar Prasad for the interview board by completely avoiding the representatives of NIC. This proves that the state government had intervened in the appointment of the high-level IT Team.

The strategically important IT appointments came to the notice of the investigating agencies when they were examining all important contracts and appointments made during the tenure of Sivasankar who is now facing the probe of central agencies in connection with the gold smuggling case.

NIC responds

Officials at the National Informatics Centre have stated that they have the capability to meet the technical requirements of the High Court. The response of the NIC, which is under the Centre’s IT department, came in the wake of the controversy over the appointments to the Kerala High Court’s high-level IT team.

State Informatics Officer and NIC deputy director general T Mohana Das told Manorama that the centre could have made technical services available had they been requested.

The NIC itself had implemented the case information system in the Kerala High Court as it had done in all the courts. Therefore, the other services could also have been provided, he said.

The task of the IT team that came later was to develop additional modules in the court information service software.

The NIC representatives wondered if it could execute a major software for courts what problem could it have had in offering other related services!