Guwahati, June 18: Retired IAS officer and former state NRC coordinator, Hitesh Dev Sarma, on Tuesday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order a high-level probe by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to probe into Rs 260 crore scam in updating of National Register of Citizens (NRC) of Assam, in which the name of three senior journalists were also entangled.

An inspection report by the Comptroller and Auditor General on the Accounts (CAG) of the state coordinator of the NRC between January 12, 2014, and December 31, 2019, has found that Rs 260 crore of funds meant for updating the NRC were misappropriated.

In the letter to PM Modi, Sarma said: “As per the CAG report, there had been financial irregularities to the tune of over Rs 260 crore during the NRC updating process till March 31, 2020. Out of the amount, Rs 155.83 crore were reportedly siphoned off from the remunerations of the data entry operators even refusing them the minimum wage rates of the country. And there might have been a huge amount of money laundering taking place in the process. The CAG fixed responsibility of these anomalies on then state NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela too.”

“As per the procedure, Prateek Hajela had to face the Public Accounts Committee to respond to all charges, but the state government allowed him to go on voluntary retirement (apparently relieving him from all charges). Two FIRs were lodged by the undersigned in this regard and further three FIRs were lodged by private parties. But surprisingly, none of the FIRs are being registered by Assam Police to date,” Sarma said in his letter.

“The Enforcement Directorate (ED) should be directed to inquire into the financial irregularities of NRC updating process and probable money laundering,” Sarma further said.
Advocating for an NIA (National Investigation Agency) probe, Sarma said the government should order an NIA probe if any foreign money was involved in the process to pave the way for the inclusion of foreign nationals’ names in the NRC of Assam.

Sarma, who took over as the state coordinator after Hajela’s superannuation, said: “A serious effort started for detection of illegal foreigners of Assam in early 2014 through updation of NRC as per the order of the Supreme Court of India. The updation of NRC was done under the leadership of senior IAS officer and state NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela. I was also involved with the process as the executive director, till early 2017. Initially, a very robust verification process was evolved to detect non-citizens and had the verification process been done diligently, we could have got an ideal NRC.”

Sarma alleged that in early 2016, Hajela started applying his discretionary power (going against the principle followed so far) which could jeopardize the very purpose of updating the NRC. The complete draft of NRC was published in July 2018 and the supplementary list was published on August 31, 2019.

“After the publication of the supplementary list, Hajela was sent to his home state (Madhya Pradesh) on deputation even though the final NRC was yet to be published. Having no other officers with adequate knowledge of NRC, the chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal assigned me as the state coordinator for the NRC updation process and accordingly, I took charge in December 2019,” Sarma said.

“After taking charge as the NRC state coordinator, I tried to realise what was done during the tenure of Hajela. After some in-house verification and analysis, I found to my utter surprise that there were so many errors in the NRC updation process, which could jeopardize the security of our nation,” he claimed.

He alleged that lakhs of names of persons were entered into Assam’s NRC as ‘originally inhabitants’, whereas they were immigrants and no way original inhabitants. “In Chamaria Revenue Circle (Kamrup district) alone, 64,247 person’s names were included in NRC whereas hardly around 500 persons were in the ‘originally inhabitants’ category. Similar errors could have been detected if the verification was done (or verification is done in future),” he said.

“13,18,639 names were included in NRC where these persons’ documents were not valid as per reports of the issuing authorities. This was done through a special verification called DMIT without the knowledge/consent of the Supreme Court. Why this special verification was done to include names of persons without valid documents raises specific questions about the involvement of vested interested elements,” he alleged.

He also alleged that Family Tree Matching was a very important verification process for the updation of NRC. It could have been a robust mechanism evolved for an error-free NRC had it been executed diligently. However, he said there were a large number of errors in the data entry process while following the Family Tree Matching.

“When 2,346 data cross-checked, I found that 943 family trees were mismatched, whereas the recorded data did not reflect it. The percentage of errors was too high by any standard. It is suspected that some data entry operators/ officers (probably with immigrant backgrounds) intentionally entered the ‘mismatched’ results as ‘matched’ to include a huge volume of suspected foreigners’ names in the NRC. Shockingly Hajela did not allow any quality check of those results by the superior officers in the Family Tree Matching verification process and thus Sri Hajela gave them a free hand to do the mischief. He helped the perpetrators by using software that did not allow any quality checks. It was a highly suspicious act on the part of Hajela,” Sarma also said.

“I also found, during sample checks, a large number of genuine Indian citizen’s names were not included in the NRC. In my sample check, around 50,000 names of Indian citizens were found missing in the NRC,” Sarma said.

He said within two months of him joining as the state coordinator (NRC Assam) on December 24, 2019, he completed his checking & analysis and all the anomalies and were reported to the Assam government as well as the Registrar General of India (RGI), advocating for a re-verification of the NRC as the said NRC with a large number of ineligible persons may pose as a serious threat to India’s national security. “The RGI did not give any heed to my report, instead asked me to prepare for the publication of the final NRC without any re-verification,” he further claimed.

Sarma went to state that: “It took almost two years to make the Union home ministry believe that the current Assam NRC was faulty and it deserves re-verification. But till now, the government has not taken any pragmatic action to re-verify the NRC.”

Sarma apprehended that the present NRC of Assam is very much faulty with lakhs of names of ineligible persons included in it. Moreover, it’s a threat to the national security and integrity especially a hazard to the indigenous people of Assam. It needs re-verification before the final publication.

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