National Register Of Citizens Data Is Safe, Says Home Ministry

The Centre on Wednesday said the National Register of Citizens data in Assam is safe even though some technical issues were visible and that will be resolved soon.

The union home ministry clarification came in view of reports that data of the final list of the NRC has been made offline from its official website.

"The NRC data is safe. Some technical issues are in visibility on cloud. These are being resolved soon," a home ministry spokesperson said.

The data was not available for a couple of days and it created panic in the public, mostly among the people excluded from the list as the rejection certificates were yet to be issued. NRC State Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma accepted that the data has been made offline, but refuted the allegation of any "malafide" intent in it.

The cloud service for the huge set of data was provided by IT firm Wipro and their contract was till Oct. 19 last year. However, this was not renewed by the previous coordinator. So, the data got offline from Dec.15 after it was suspended by Wipro, Sarma said.

He said the state coordination committee had decided to do necessary formalities in its meeting on Jan. 30 and wrote to the Wipro during the first week of February.

"Once Wipro makes the data live, it will be available for the public. We hope people will be able to access it in the next 2-3 days," Sarma said. The complete detail of exclusion and inclusion of bonafide Indian citizens in the NRC was uploaded on its official website http://www.nrcassam.nic.in after the final list was published on Aug. 31, 2019.

The final NRC was published by excluding 19.07 lakh persons. A total of 3.11 crore names were included out of 3.30 crore applicants.

After the earlier NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela relinquished the charge on Nov. 11 following his transfer to home state Madhya Pradesh on a direction from the Supreme Court, Sarma was appointed in his place on Nov. 9.