Guwahati: Assam Government on Saturday appointed state civil services officer Hitesh Dev Sarma as the new National Register of Citizens coordinator of the state. He is likely to take charge on Monday
As per reports, the decision was taken by a Supreme Court bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and justices SA Bobde and RF Nariman by passing an order for the deputation of former NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela after two separate cases for wrong inclusion of names in final NRC list was registered in Assam.
Interestingly, the newly inducted state coordinator has been serving as a secretary in the state’s finance and urban development department and was associated with the NRC process in Assam in its initial stages.
With the final NRC published in Assam on August 31 this year, in which names of over 19 lakh people got excluded, the newly inducted state coordinator will not have much work to do. He will be responsible to issue rejection letters to those applicants whose names did not get published in the final list.
The state government reportedly had a tough time in selecting a new person to replace Hajela as the bureaucrats from the state denied to take over charges as the NRC coordinator.
A native of Madhya Pradesh, Hajela is a 1995-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre with a B Tech degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. Before he was commissioned as the Assam NRC coordinator, Hajela was holding the position of mission director at National Rural Health Mission; commissioner and secretary, health and family welfare in the state.
