68-year-old, Partha Pratim Mazumdar, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, has been appointed as the state coordinator of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to replace Hitesh Dev Sarma, who is retiring on Sunday.
Mazumdar will be secretary to the government’s Home and Political Department in addition to serving as Registrar, Cooperative Societies, and Secretary to the Women and Child Development Department.
Hitesh Dev Sarma recently filed a FIR with the Assam government’s Vigilance and Anti-Corruption wing, alleging corruption and money laundering by his predecessor Prateek Hajela. Furthermore, he claimed that the software was purposefully designed to avoid quality checks.
Dev Sarma accused Hajela of doing this on purpose, which gave some officials carte blanche to include suspect citizens on the NRC list. People who arrived in India prior to March 25, 1971, must prove their citizenship in Assam.
The statutory notification for the start of the Supreme Court-monitored exercise was issued in December 2013 in order to distinguish Indian citizens from undocumented immigrants residing in Assam and to update the 1951 NRC in the state.
The draft list was published in August 2019, excluding 19.06 lakh applications out of 3.3 crore due to a lack of adequate documents to establish their Indian citizenship. The final draught of the NRC is “faulty,” according to the Assam government, and excludes several indigenous people.
Assam’s 100 Foreigners’ Tribunals were tasked with hearing appeals from people who were not on the NRC list. The so-called “foreigners” are housed in detention facilities, now known as transit camps. Detention centres have been housed within central jails in Dibrugarh, Goalpara, Jorhat, Kokrajhar, Silchar, and Tezpur since 2008.
