Guwahati: The president of the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) Samujjal Bhattacharjya questioned on Sunday why people mentioned in the irregularities pertaining to the updating procedure of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam haven’t received punishments yet.
This comes after a report presented by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) in the Assam Assembly on Saturday highlighted obvious irregularities.
The AASU chief said, “There should no further delay in dishing out punishments to the accused. Severe and exemplary punishment should be given to them.”
Bhattacharjya said, “Corruption at this level cannot be tolerated. Due to gross negligence of the Supreme Court’s directives, errors cropped up in the NRC compilation.”
He continued by calling for an error-free final draught of the Assam NRC in order to purge the state of unauthorised Bangladeshi immigrants.
Speaking further about the CAG report, Bhattacharjya said, “CAG report shows manipulation of NRC. The Central Government and the Government of Assam should apply to the Supreme Court for review of the matter.”
“Whoever is associated with the massive discrepancies in whatever capacity should be punished,” added the AASU chief.
The Assam Assembly received a CAG report during the current session that pointed out significant irregularities in the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam.
According to a report the CAG submitted for the fiscal year that concluded in 2020, poor planning caused up to 215 software utilities to be haphazardly added to the main programme.
The CAG report read, “Due to lack of proper planning in this regard, to the extent of 215 software utilities were added in a haphazard manner to the core software. It was done without following the due process of either software development or selection of vendors through eligibility assessment following a national tendering.”
According to CAG, the update procedure should have employed extremely dependable and secure software.
The report claims that because the software and tools for NRC data gathering and correction were improperly developed, there was a chance that the data could be altered without leaving an audit trail.
It said that while the audit trail may have guaranteed accountability for the accuracy of NRC data the goal of a legitimate, error-free NRC could not be achieved.
Additionally, the CAG stated that the time required from the initial conceptualization caused the project cost for the NRC to increase from an initial Rs 288.18 crores to Rs 1602.66 crores.