Malafide Intent? Assam NRC Data Goes Missing from Website

The roles of IT-major Wipro and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party may come under the scanner after the final data of the list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, has been missing from the website over the past few days.

The website itself (http://www.nrcassam.nic.in/) re-directs one to another titled thefinalnrc.com, which has the final NRC list for Assam with supplementary inclusions and exclusions. The website is down, inaccessible even via the Wayback Machine, a web-crawler which archives pages.

The website has been down for a few days creating panic among those excluded who were yet to receive rejection certificates. NRC State Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma told PTI that Wipro was contracted till October 19, 2019. Sarma says he took charge on December 24, nine days after Wipro suspended the page.

“So, the data got offline from December 15 after it was suspended by Wipro,” he was quoted saying. Sarma told the news agency that the contract was not renewed and rejected charges of any “malafide” intent behind the missing data. He added that the state coordination committee had written to Wipro in February and that the website should be up in the next two to three days.

Debabrata Saikia, Congress MLA and Leader of Opposition in the Assam Assembly, has written to the Registrar General of India, requesting him to look into the matter. Calling it a “deliberate violation of the directive issued by the Hon'ble Supreme Court”, Saikia mentioned that the database had gone missing at a time when the appeals process against the NRC hasn’t begun due to a “go-slow attitude adopted by the NRC Authority.” In his letter, Saikia said that the missing page “also violates the rules pertaining to the NRC, which stipulates various processes post publication of the NRC”.

The final NRC list included 3,11,21,004 names out of 3,30,27,661 applicants, rejecting a total of 19,06,657 people.

IT major Wipro has already come into scrutiny when nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the NRC began in December. The firm deleted this page, titled ‘Digital Governance: Achieving Citizen Enrolment in Record Time’, from its website. The page, which details the processes undertaken by Wipro to implement the NRC, was restored later.

The page says that Wipro trained deployed more than 8,000 data entry operators and put in a data center at Guwahati. The process involved over 8,000 laptops, 6000 scanners and other peripherals along with 100 computers in parallel.

Prior to the protests, Wipro had already been facing the heat. In September 2019, the Labour Commissioner’s office in Assam dragged the company to court for a complaint filed in September 2017 by data entry employees.

The petition, lodged with the court of the chief judicial magistrate in Guwahati, alleges that Wipro flouted the Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act 1970. Wipro, the only company to bid for the NRC tender in 2014, leased the recruitment of 7,000 data entry operators to a Guwahati firm named Integrated Systems and Services (ISS).

Eight data operators reportedly approached the Labour Commissionerate on September 8, 2017, alleging that they were paid Rs 5,050 per month instead of the Rs 14,500 set aside by the government.

The Contract Labour Act applies to: “(a) To every establishment in which twenty or more workmen are employed or were employed on any day of the preceding twelve months as contract labour; (b) to every contractor who employees or who employed on any day of the preceding twelve months twenty or more workmen.”