Guwahati: Assam government prosecuted Prateek Hajela, a former NRC coordinator on Wednesday for his alleged role in the anomalies that took place while the final drafting of the controversial list was released.
The state government filed the lawsuit after becoming suo moto aware of the circumstance. The state government took its decision after the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report was submitted.
The CAG study uncovered a number of issues with how the NRC list update process was conducted. Chief minister of Assam today said that Prateek Hajela should take voluntary retirement (VRS).
CM Sarma said, “It would be better if Prateek Hajela took VRS. It would be a victory for the people of Assam if he took VRS.”
In May 2021, Prateek Hajela was accused of committing an anti-national act by facilitating the entry of names of ineligible people as Indian citizens in the contentious document. Prateek Hajela oversaw the updating and publication of the contentious document under the direction of the Supreme Court.
The NRC authority contends that substantial irregularities were made during the document’s creation and it has petitioned the Supreme Court in an affidavit for a thorough and deadline-bound re-verification of the published NRC.
The state’s BJP-led government has asked that 20% of the data in the districts that border Bangladesh and 10% of the data in the interior be re-verified.
It should be noted that Prateek Hajela started revising the NRC of 1951 in 2015, and the whole list was published in August 2019. 19,06,657 people are not named in the final list, but 3,11,21,004 are.
According to the FIR, the then-state coordinator Prateek Hajela may have ordered the use of software that prevented quality check and made it simpler to enter the names of ineligible people into the NRC, thereby purposefully avoiding the required quality check and endangering national security. Despite the Supreme Court of India’s directive for an error-free NRC, this is the case.
The FIR has also named few other officers and data entry operators who are alleged to have “conspired” along with Hajela.