Assam auditor finds financial irregularities worth Rs 155 crore in NRC, raises finger at top official

An audit by the Principal Accountant General of Assam has found financial irregularities and anomalies to the tune of Rs 155 crore during the compilation of the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) between 2015 and 2019. The report also indicates that IAS officer Prateek Hajela, the then state coordinator of the NRC, was aware of these irregularities.

According to the audit report, exclusively accessed by India Today NE, Ms Wipro, the system integrator, which was given the task of supplying data entry operators, paid the data entry operators between Rs 5,500 and Rs 9,100 per month through the NRC authorities had released to Wipro Rs 14,500—Rs 17,500 per month to be paid to every data entry operator. The operators were even denied the minimum wage as per the provisions of the Minimum Wages Act 1948.

In March 2019, the Labour Commission of Assam/India conducted an inquiry following a complaint raised by a group of operators and subsequently issued a show-cause notice to Wipro. The firm, however, contested that the workers engaged were semi-skilled or unskilled. The audit report, however, concluded that an undue benefit of Rs 155.83 crore was allowed to Wipro/labour contractor even after allowing a 10 per cent reasonable profit margin to the contractor.

More importantly, Wipro was not permitted to subcontract any activities related to system design, development, deployment, enhancement of NRC software solution, data centre operation, and network integration with the data centre and was asked to obtain prior approval and clearance of the NRC authorities. Yet, Wipro had engaged a sub-contractor, M/S Integrated System and Services, owned by a certain Utpal Hazarika, for providing data entry operators without any prior approval from the authority, found the audit report.

It also stated that though Hajela officially did not approve the proposal of Wipro for engaging M/S Integrated System and Services, he knew that a sub-contractor was being used to provide data entry operators. On June 13, Hajela’s successor and current NRC state coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma alleged corruption and money laundering by Hajela and filed a complaint with the Assam Police’s Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Wing.  In his FIR, he said that “undue benefit to the tune of Rs 155.83 crore is a huge amount and it is reasonable to suspect that kickbacks and money laundering must have occurred in the process”. 

While talking to India Today NE Dev Sarma said that during his investigation it came to light that one Proloy Seal worked as a middleman in the whole process. He was neither an employee of the office of the state coordinator nor a contractor engaged by the office. “Seal was always seen in the office. It is suspected that he was the key person in managing the kickbacks and money laundering. A detailed investigation into the transactions of the persons involved is likely to prove corruption and money laundering,” says Dev Sarma.

Meanwhile, Assam Public Works (APW) president Abhijeet Sharma, the main petitioner who had moved the Supreme Court demanding an updated NRC, has filed eight FIRs (with CBI, CID of Assam Police, Police Vigilance and Anti-Corruption of Assam Police and Geetanagar Police Station) against Hajela for alleged misappropriation of the NRC fund. According to reliable sources, on May 18, 2021, the vigilance department, based on Sharma’s complaint, requested the Assam government to accord the necessary approval for initiating an enquiry. The request is still pending with the home department of the Assam government.

In 2019, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in an interim report found financial irregularities to the tune of Rs 108 crore during the preparation of NRC. In 2014, a sum of Rs 288.18 crore was approved by the Registrar General of India to update the NRC within three years. However, due to a slew of changes in the updating procedures, the sum had been revised to Rs 1,607.67 crore by 2020.

The Assam audit report further revealed an avoidable expenditure to the tune of Rs 10.73 crore in connection with the engagement of third-party consultants and provision for the execution of any supplementary agreement with Wipro which wasn’t in the Master Service Agreement or Service Level Agreement.  An excess expenditure amounting to Rs 1.78 crore on project management operations was also observed by the auditors.

He also had incurred excessive expenditure of Rs 21.02 crore on generators, temporary misappropriation of Rs 1.22 crore against 128 additional generators, Rs 7.10 crore in software development (including payment of Rs 3.13 crore towards the incorporation of Bengali language, a search of transliterated legacy data, and ID generation), Rs 7.37 crore relating to digitization of application form at System Integrator Data Entry Centre, Rs 9.01 crore on doubtful data movement in NRC Seva Kendras.

Although the state coordinator was not delegated the power to create posts or engage work-charged/MR/Ad-hoc and casual workers, Hajela engaged some consultants without taking the requisite approval from the relevant authorities, said the report.

When contacted, Hajela declined to speak to India Today NE on record. The Assam-Meghalaya IAS officer is currently posted in his home state of Madhya Pradesh, following an order by the Supreme Court of India. In 2020, he moved the top court requesting an order to restrain Assam government/police authorities from registering any complaint or FIR against him without the permission of the court. He also sought an order restraining the state government/police authorities from taking any coercive action against him based on NRC-related complaints.

The NRC is a list of Indian citizens living in Assam and was first prepared in 1951. The objective of the NRC is to segregate Indian citizens living in the state from those, who illegally entered the state from Bangladesh. The process to update the 1951 register began following a Supreme Court order in 2013, with the state’s nearly 33 million people having to prove that they were Indian nationals prior to March 24, 1971. In the final draft NRC list published on August 31, a total of 3,11,21,004 persons were found eligible for inclusion in the list, leaving out 19,06,657 persons, including those who did not submit their claims in Assam.