Assam NRC Data Goes Offline From Official Website! Opposition Suspects 'Malafide Act'

The details of exclusion and inclusion of bonafide Indian citizens in the NRC was uploaded on the official government website after the final list was published on August 31, 2019. This data has not been available for the last couple of days, leading to panic among the public. Those who have been excluded from the list are more worried as rejection certificates are yet to be issued.

However, NRC State Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma refuted the claims of the opposition and said that it happened because the contract with Wipro was not renewed.

"The cloud service for the huge set of data was provided by Wipro and their contract was till October 19 last year. However, this was not renewed by the earlier Coordinator. So, the data got offline from December 15 after it was suspended by Wipro. I assumed charge on December 24," Sarma was quoted as saying by PTI.

He said that in its meeting on January 30, the state coordination committee decided to follow necessary formalities and had written to Wipro in the first week of February. He added that the data will be available for the public once Wipro takes it live.

"We hope that people will be able to access it in the next 2-3 days," Sarma said.

Meanwhile, Debabrata Saikia, leader of the Opposition in Assam Assembly, on Tuesday, February 11, wrote to the Registrar General of India, seeking his intervention in the matter.

"It is a mystery as to why the online data should vanish all of a sudden, especially as the appeals process has not even started due to the go-slow attitude adopted by the NRC Authority. There is, therefore, ample scope to suspect that the disappearance of online data is a malafide act," he wrote in the letter.

He further wrote that the deletion of data was a violation of the rules concerning the NRC. "Indeed, the deletion of data from the NRC website at a time when the appeals process is yet to start, is prima facie a deliberate violation of the directive issued by the Hon'ble Supreme Court. This act also violates the rules pertaining to the NRC, which stipulates various processes post publication of the NRC," he wrote.