The Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC) authorities have filed a police complaint against a former NRC coordinator in the state, Prateek Hajela. The First Information Report or FIR, filed with the Criminal Investigation Department or CID, also names several other officials and workers engaged in the NRC updating effort in Assam.
The current NRC state coordinator, Hitesh Dev Sarma, has accused Mr Hajela and others of “criminal and anti-national conduct”.
In his letter to the CID, Mr Dev Sarma states in the NRC updating effort; that the “Family Tree Matching” technique was employed to detect fraudulent activities used to make fake connection claims with individuals living in Assam before 1971.
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Since the NRC updating project included substantial personnel, there was a mechanism for quality checks to eliminate erroneous entries in the NRC before ‘Family Tree Matching’ was launched. But, the technique did not have any quality control mechanism.
The NRC authority also conducted sample surveys in three sites in the state to measure the impact of a lack of quality inspections and identified a substantial proportion of erroneous entries in the NRC list.
Mr Dev Sarma believes the program was purposefully intended to bypass quality tests. He accused Mr Hajela of intentionally doing this, which provided a free hand to certain employees for adding questionable persons to the NRC list.
According to Mr Dev Sarma, this might be considered anti-national conduct undermining national security.
Mr Hajela was also accused of breaking a Supreme court decision in 2018, which did not let the NRC state coordinator evaluate the official verification of papers previously completed for 24,89,745 persons. But the letter to the CID states that Mr Hajela approved the review process against the highest court ruling.
In September 2019, the Assam Police had lodged two complaints against Mr Hajela and a few other employees over claims of anomalies in the NRC list.
