The central vigilance commission has denied a report that its entire online data, including complaints, with the Central Vigilance Commission before November 28, 2016 has been lost following a server crash.

The anti-graft body has told Outlook that there was no loss of data but “inability in reading certain files” due to platform migration.

A senior official at the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) denied the report that a hard disk crash had wiped out the entire data on the Central Vigilance Commission’s sever onNovember 28, roughly three weeks after demonetization. The technical difficulties arose due to migration of data from a physical server to a cloud-based storage.

The report mentions that the website of the anti-graft watchdog’s has not been operational for about four months now. The CVC was set-up in 1964 to address cases of corruption within the government.

“We transferred maintenance work from TCS to NIC last year. NIC migrated our data to a cloud storage system and this made the earlier system (maintained by TCS) redundant. There has been no loss of data but there are some technical issues due to which we are unable to read some of the old data,” said Nilam Sawhney I.A.S., secretary, CVC told Outlook.

The agency also denied the report that the files weren’t backed up.

“We have asked TCS to help us read some of that old data. Besides this, we have a backup of all files, which is kept for at least one year as per our practice so we have all data for 2015-16,”said the officer.

All complaints sent to the CVC are in hard or physical copy. The CVC investigates complaints in which facts are verifiable and prioritized for action. Sawhney said that all complaints which are being investigated are stored securely and safely.

The stored data, which has been migrated, is of complaints that have not been investigated. Despite there being a practice to keep such complaints in the server up to a year, the CVC stores these for up to two-three years in some cases.

The report, quoting sources, mentioned the case of an RTI applicant The CVC had wrote to him that it was unable to process his request due to “technical problem in the working of the complaint portal”. H.R. Kosia from Mumbai had filed an RTI application with the CVC in 2013 alleging malpractice in the Textile Ministry, now headed by Smriti Irani.

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