Assam Public Work demands probe into alleged graft in NRC update

STAFF REPORTER

GUWAHATI: The Assam Public Work (APW), an NGO, on Monday met the State NRC Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma and demanded a high-level investigation into the alleged corruption in updating the NRC (National Register of Citizens).

“We have demanded a third-party audit by some internationally acclaimed organisation into the functioning of the software, application and IT Infrastructure utilized in the process of NRC,” said APW advisor Abhijeet Sharma.

In a petition submitted to State NRC Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma, the APW has demanded a high-level probe into the alleged corruption committed by the previous NRC authority headed by Prateek Hajela.

“Hundreds of numbers of different software were used in updating the NRC. Ideally, there should be a test run for every software to judge its performance, and all the software need some time to get it settled. But as per the information available, it seems that most of the software were put into the verification without any test whatsoever leading to serious malfunction, which ultimately resulted in wrong entries into the NRC. We also suspect that manipulation of data, which can be deleted only through an IT; audit of which was never done during the process of updating the NRC,” the APW stated in its petition.

The petition said even though a large number of fake certificates have been detected, these are of no value so far as NRC updating is concerned; as most of such fake documents are used for the second generation (like birth Certificates of present generation). Most of the first generation of the Legacy persons has used Electoral Roll as link document, which is not dependable at all. The normal practice followed by the illegal migrants is to enter their names in the post 1971 Electoral Rolls assuming as offspring of someone whose name figured in the pre-1971 Electoral Roll, as there were no fool proof methods of detecting this fraudulent activity in the Electoral Revision, the petition said.

“The verification of “Family Tree” would have been the foolproof method of NRC verification, had it been done properly. In the Family Tree verification, all the offspring of a ‘Legacy Person’ were asked to submit their family details which were compared through software. The Family Trees of the genuine offspring match and the Family Tree of the persons who assumes a name in the pre-1971 documents as their ancestors do not match with that of the genuine offspring,” the petition added.

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