thiruvananthapuram a new controversy has erupted over kiran kerala information of residents aarogyam network a survey carried out by keralas health department with whistleblowers alleging that public health data is being shared with population health research institute phri a canadian agencythe caravan a delhibased magazine has published emails exchanged by senior officials from the kerala government notably rajeev sadanandan a top health bureaucrat who served under both ldf and udf governments k vijaykumar a professor at government medical college in thiruvananthapuram and kr thankappan an emeritus professor at achutha menon centre for health science studies also in thiruvananthapuram with dr salim yusuf a professor at mcmaster university in canada who heads the phriin one email to vijaykumar published by the caravan dr yusuf reportedly says if the govt will agree we can use any approach that works including what we had for the pilot as long as we have data transferred to phri every day in fact few times a dayhealth department denies whistleblowers allegations says data safe with statethe phri is a private foreign institute that collaborates with pharmaceutical companies on clinical trials and drug researchthe state health department has strongly denied the whistleblowers allegations and claims that that the data it has collected is safe with the state data cell and has not been shared with anyoneincidentally kiran launched by the ldf government in 2018 to come up with effective plans to fight noncommunicable diseases is a clone of kerala health observatory baseline study khobs conducted in 2012 also with the help of phri khobs was initiated by oommen chandys udf government but was scrapped after the left parties then in the opposition cried foul over data falling into foreign hands kiran shares the same objectives scope and even the software as its aborted predecessorkiran targeted 10 lakh people in the state and was carried out by achutha menon centre for health science studies for the state health department we had sought the permission of the centre since we thought we need an academic collaboration with phri for further studies by sharing the data but the health ministry screening committee hmsc clearance was denied by icmr their view was that india has the capability of data analysis and there was no need to involve a foreign agency since the argument of the icmr was right we stopped from proceeding with that we cannot do data sharing without the permission of icmr and the centre said dr v raman kutty the then head of achutha menon centrefor khobss first survey in 2012 the software was developed by the canadian agency and was used for data collection referring to kiran rajeev sadanandan the then health secretary said it was purely a state funded study the study has been carried out successfully by the achutha menon centre for the last two years in fact we had decided to publish the data in the public domain such that everyone can have access to it we had