The final data of the citizen’s list in Assam has vanished from the official website, where the data was published last August.
According to NDTV, the Union Home Ministry said that the data is safe and cited that due to some technical glitch, the data is not visible on the website. The ministry also assured that the problem will be resolved soon.
As per the NRC authorities, due to non-renewal of a contract with Wipro, the data disappeared. Earlier, after completing the final list, the complete detail of exclusion and inclusion of bonafide Indian citizens in the NRC was uploaded on the official website.
NRC state co-ordinator, Hitesh Dev Sharma, told news agency PTI,
The cloud service for the huge set of data was provided by Wipro and their contract was till October 19 last year. However, this was not renewed by the earlier co-coordinator, Prateek Hajela. So, the data got offline from December 15 after it was suspended by Wipro. I assumed charge on December 24.
He further added,
Once Wipro makes the data live, it will be available for the public. We hope that people will be able to access it in the next two to three days.
This incident came at a time when the final NRC list in Assam is yet to be officially notified by the Registrar General of India. After the incident, the Congress party has termed this as mysterious and a mala fide act.
Assam assembly’s opposition leader, Debabrata Saikia, wrote to the Registrar General of India and requested him to look into the matter. He wrote, “It is a mystery as to why the online data should vanish all of a sudden, especially as the appeals process has not even started due to the go-slow attitude adopted by the NRC Authority.”
After the news broke out, people started calling out the government.
It would be interesting to see how long will the government take to resolve the issue and what step it takes to make sure that people don’t face such issues in the future.
