Assam NRC data go missing from site, contract with Wipro expires

Guwahati: Thousands of people across Assam got the scare of their lives when they found that all their data had disappeared from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) website.

The data which was available online till a few days ago was all gone. Why? Because the NRC authorities did not pay the renewal money to maintain the data online to Wipro — the Azim Premji-owned IT firm responsible for the job.

The official website, ‘www.nrcassam.nic.in’, contained the comprehensive details of exclusion and inclusion of citizens in the final NRC list which was published on August 31 last year. It excluded the names of 19 lakh citizens.

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The NRC data were stored in a cloud storage provided by Wipro, which expired in December last year, and the renewal was not done as there was no state NRC coordinator for some time after the transfer of the former coordinator Prateek Hajela in November last year. However, after Hitesh Dev Sarma took charge, the renewal works are underway and the website is expected to be running in a day or two, said reports.

Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition in Assam Assembly Debabrata Saikia has written to the Registrar General of India requesting him to urgently look into the matter.

Saikia called the disappearance of data a mala fide act. He highlighted that when the appeals process has not even started due to the lackadaisical attitude adopted by NRC authority, therefore, their disappearance is a deliberate violation of the Supreme Court’s directive.

The new NRC state coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma accepted that the website is down, but refuted the ‘mala fide’ intention behind it.