The exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam was an expensive failure and former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi was silent on the irregularities committed under former State NRC Coordinator Prateek Hajela, his successor Hitesh Dev Sarma said.
The apex court, which monitored the NRC exercise, transferred Mr. Hajela, an Assam-Meghalaya cadre IAS officer, to his home State Madhya Pradesh soon after the complete draft list of citizens was published on August 31, 2019. About 19.06 lakh out of the 3.3 crore applicants were left out of the list for lack of proper citizenship documents.
“The family tree verification part of the exercise was faulty. I had checked the documents of 2,300 people after taking charge and found 900 of them were enlisted erroneously, which suggests 40% of the people included are ineligible,” Mr. Sarma, who retired as the NRC Coordinator on July 31, said.
