(MOREPIC1) Nava Thakuria
As the Supreme Court of India recently agreed to hear a petition asking for a comprehensive and time-bound re-verification of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) updated in Assam during 2014-2019, the people of Assam may expect a correct list of genuine nationals living in the north-eastern State. The apex court on 22 August 2025 responded positively to the plea forwarded by Hitesh Devsarma, a former State coordinator to NRC Assam himself, for an error-free NRC. Admitting the writ petition, the SC issued notices to the centre, Assam government, NRC coordinator and the Registrar General of India (RGI).
The 1951 NRC for Assam was updated following the direction of the SC with an aim to detect all illegal citizens with the cut-off date 25 March 1971 (which was accepted in the memorandum of settlement signed in 1985 to culminate the six years long Assam agitation to detect & deport millions of unrecognised migrants from Bangladesh).
Following a petition by Assam Public Works, the SC directed for the NRC updation and it also reportedly monitored the process. Prateek Hajela, a 1995 batch IAS officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre was appointed as the State coordinator to supervise the massive exercise. Soon after the final NRC draft was released on 31 August 2019, where 19 lakh individuals were put as undocumented, Hajela was sent to his home-State Madhya Pradesh fearing security.
Soon the NRC updating process got embraced with corruption & malpractices and it was detected by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). As per its report, there had been financial irregularities to the tune of Rs 260 crores during the process and the highest national audit body recommended penal actions against Hajela and Wipro limited (system integrator). Prior to the CAG report, Hajela’s successor Devsarma raised mishandling of the NRC process to help a large number of infiltrator’s names in the list.
He framed a serious allegation that the technocrat turned bureaucrat had tampered with software in the process to entertain those foreigners in the pursuit of personal greed. Thus hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi Muslim settlers’ names were included in the NRC draft. An important verification mechanism titled ‘Family Tree Matching’ was also compromised by Hajela and his associates. So Devsarma demanded probes by the National Investigation Agency and the Directorate of Enforcement against Hajela.
Lately, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma also admitted that the NRC draft list was faulty and the fraud was committed on Asomiya people during the process (for which New Delhi spent Rs 1600 crores).
The saffron leader asserted that Hajela prepared a wrong NRC for Assam. The conscious citizens continue demanding for an authentic NRC for Assam and a fair probe into the findings of CAG regarding the corruption and also deprivation of salaries meant for nearly 6000 part-time workers. Employed as data entry operators (DEOs), those workers got only Rs 5,500 to 9,100 per month per person (which is below the country’s basic minimum wage), whereas the Wipro company received an average of Rs 14,500 per month per DEO. The total volume of siphoned money (even after deducting the reasonable profit margin) is estimated to be over Rs 100 crore, which still remains in the pockets of Wipro or its sub-contractor Integrated System & Services till date.
Leaving aside a few exceptions, Assam media remained largely shy of reporting the financial malpractices that took place during the NRC updating process. In fact, the majority of local media persons tried their best to spread misinformation (reasons best known to them only), where some Guwahati-based television journalists bent upon proving that the NRC final draft as the most sought-after document for the indigenous population.
They shamelessly lobbied for accepting it with no verification. At least one TV talk-show host was named and shamed on social media, but he did not respond to the allegation (not done till date). The outspoken scribe even published a book praising Hajela's work as unparalleled with a push for national recognition to him. Hence it’s assumed that a genuine probe would unearth all guilty individuals who wanted to cheat the nation for their selfish gains.
