As Audit Finds Holes In Assam Citizen Register (NRC), Ex-Chief’s “Told You So”

Hitesh Dev Sarma, former coordinator of the National Register of Citizens update exercise in Assam.

Guwahati:

Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) – in the news after an audit found several financial and software-related anomalies – had huge holes even three years ago, but governments did not pay heed, its former in-charge Hitesh Dev Sarma has said.

“Lakhs of foreigners were included (in the register), while thousands of those excluded were actually Indian citizens,” Mr Sarma told NDTV in an exclusive interview following the recent findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG).

The Assam NRC, ordered and monitored by the Supreme Court, has been in limbo since 2019 following allegations of procedural lapses and corruption from different quarters.

A recent CAG report stated that 215 software utilities were randomly added to the core software used for updating. It also said that the project cost for NRC increased from Rs 288.18 crore to Rs 1,602.66 crore as it took a long time. It said that due to financial irregularities in salary, undue benefit of Rs 155.83 crore was given to the contractors.

Mr. Sarma explained, “After taking charge in December 2019, I found that the process was not done the way it really should have been done.”

He said he reported to the Registrar General of India – a bureaucratic overseer of all censuses and other demographic surveys in India – “but there was no response”.

Further, he said that he has filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking re-verification of the NRC.

“When the state and central government did not respond to my request for investigation, I had no option but to file an FIR with the police,” he said.

In the draft NRC published in August 2019, over 19 lakh people were left out in an exercise that was originally billed as a crackdown on illegal immigration from neighboring Bangladesh. But its information is yet to be received.

What makes the NRC more contentious is that any Hindus (and five other non-Muslim communities) left out due to lack of documents will have the safety net of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which seeks to deny citizenship to such people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, promises. and Bangladesh. Muslims do not have any such charity.