FIR lodged against former NRC official in Guwahati

GUWAHATI: The office of the state NRC coordinator on Wednesday filed an FIR with police against one of its former lady official, who has left the organization without surrendering the password in her custody to access the data.
An official source, who does not want to be named said, “We have filed (FIR) against a NRC officer in a police station on Wednesday for not providing password to data records system. The officer has left NRC office without handing over the password. This comes under the purview of the official secrets act and as a result all authorized officers are not able to access the data.”
The source refused to say since when the NRC authority were without the access to the data in absence of the password and why it took so much time to approach the police. “We can only say that the lady official left her job soon after Prateek Hajela left the state on an inter-cadre transfer to Madhya Pradesh in mid-November last year.”
Paltanbazar police station in the city said that the FIR from NRC office is being registered but refused to give any details against the accused ex-employee of NRC office.
Along with the 3.3 crore people of Assam, officials can no longer can see their inclusion or exclusion status in the NRC in the official website, because the list of has been taken off by IT major WIPRO because the NRC authorities have not renewed the subscription towards the cloud storage.
The source said, “Wipro is calming that outstanding to the tune of Rs 70 Crore, including the cloud storage subscription fee, but our estimate shows that it is about Rs 60 Crore. We are in the process of reconciling this.”
The ministry of home affairs on Wednesday said that the NRC data of Assam has disappeared from the official website due to “some technical issues” but the “data is safe.”
Wipro, which was entrusted with storing the data in cloud in a statement said, “The IT Services Contract was not renewed by the authorities upon its expiry in October, 2019. However, as a gesture of goodwill, Wipro continued to pay the hosting service fee until January- end, 2020.”
NRC officials on Tuesday said that the subscription for the storage service provided by WIPRO was not renewed as there was no coordinator after the transfer of the former coordinator Prateek Hajela, but the Assam Public Works (APW), based on whose petition in 2009 the Supreme Court had ordered the updating of NRC, has filed an FIR with CID alleging that Hajela committed cybercrime during the NRC exercise.
“We have requested the CID to register a case against Hajela for tampering with valuable public records and conduct an inquiry into his involvement in cybercrime during the NRC updating process,” APW president Aabhijeet Sarma said.
The Supreme Court on August 13 last year had directed Hajela to formulate a strong security regime to store the data like Aadhar data before publishing the final list to prevent it from illegal activities.