Did NRC co-ordinator Prateek Hajela mislead the Supreme Court?

It has already been in the realm of public allegations. Almost all the stakeholders of the updating exercise of the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) for Assam have rejected the final draft of this record book of citizens on the ground of alleged anomalies involved in the process. They complained that many illegal immigrants found their way to the NRC while some legitimate Indian citizens have been left out. Some of them, including Assam Public Works (APW), the NGO which had approached the Supreme Court seeking the update of the 1951 NRC, even claimed financial irregularities during the compilation of the updated NRC between 2015 and 2019, alleging that IAS officer Prateek Hajela, the then state coordinator of the NRC, was involved in these malpractices.

 

These allegations have now got an official stamp from the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India. A CAG report, tabled in the state Assembly on December 23, has detected large scale anomalies in the process of updating the NRC and concluded that “the intended objective of preparing a valid, error-free NRC had not been met”. The report also confirms what Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had told India Today NE on December 14: the NRC list was erroneous. He even categorically had blamed Hajela for the anomalies in the NRC. The CAG report also puts the blame squarely on Hajela.

 

Now that there has been an official admission of “error” in the process, and responsibility has also been fixed, the big question is whether Sarma-led Assam government would take any action against Hajela. On December 14, when India Today NE asked why his government was not taking any action against Hajela if the IAS officer was guilty, Sarma said that Hajela was protected by the Supreme Court.

 

That’s not legally true though. At the moment, Hajela has no legal immunity from any coercive action. In 2020, Hajela moved the Supreme 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 appeal is still pending before Supreme Court.

 

In October 2019, the Supreme Court had transferred Hajela, an Assam-Meghalaya cadre IAS officer, to his home state Madhya Pradesh for “maximum period permissible under relevant guidelines”. To a query from Attorney General KK Venugopal if there was a reason behind the decision, the then Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi did not specify any reason but said, “Can there be any order without a reason?” In his autobiography, published in 2021, Justice Gogoi wrote that the personal attacks on Hajela by local politicians and particularly by APW chief Abhijit Sarma convinced the top court to protect Hajela from undue harassment. “Subsequent events like filing of FIRs against Hajela and other NRC officials; allegations of corruption and threats to order CBI probes besides enormous misinformation to the media and wide publicity thereof leave me convinced that Bench was thoroughly justified in passing the rather unusual order…” wrote Justice Gogoi.

 

Even though he is serving in Madhya Pradesh, Assam government is well within its rights to initiate action against Hajela, if there are enough documents and evidence confirming his role in the anomalies detected by the CAG report in the preparation of the NRC. The first step could be action on the basis of the FIR filed against Hajela in May by Hitesh Dev Sarma, Hajela’s successor as state coordinator of NRC. In his complaint, Dev Sarma alleged treason on the part of Hajela for intentionally allowing irregularities in preparing the NRC, which facilitated inclusion of illegal immigrants in the list.

 

According to Dev Sarma, Hajela knowingly disobeyed law, wilfully avoided proper quality checks in the process of updating NRC and allowed declared foreigners, doubtful voters, and their descendants to enlist their names. Terming this as anti-national activity, which could threaten India’s security, Dev Sarma lodged a case against Hajela and some other officers with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Assam police under Sections 120B, 166A, 167, 181, 218, 420 and 466 of Indian Penal Code (IPC).

 

By publicly blaming Hajela, the chief minister has already accepted the validity of this complaint. So, will there be any action, now? There is an even trickier question. The NRC updating exercise was done directly under the supervision of the Supreme Court. Does the CAG report now indicate that Hajela, if proven guilty, misled the Supreme Court? The Assam government must come clean on this as the CAG report has the potential to tarnish the image of the apex court, which was involved in the monitoring of the process, excluding the financial part, and insulated the entire NRC updating exercise from the interference of the Central and Assam government.

 

What are the anomalies?

 

The CAG report has pointed out that the software used to prepare the NRC was faulty. “In NRC updating process, a highly secure and reliable software was required to be developed; audit, however, observed lack of proper planning in this regard to the extent of 215 software utilities were added in a haphazard manner to the core software,” read the report. This is an exact opposite assessment of what Justice Gogoi wrote in his autobiography: “This mammoth exercise, which was beyond the scope of human endeavour could only be accomplished by skilful use of software, was completed successfully, leading to the publication of the final NRC on 31 August 2019.”

 

More importantly, the report stated that these software were added without adhering to due processes of either software development, or selection of vendors through eligibility assessment under national tendering. “Haphazard development of software and utilities for NRC data capture and correction posed the risk of data tampering without leaving any audit trail. The audit trail could have ensured accountability for veracity of NRC data. Thus, the intended objective of preparing a valid, error-free NRC has not been met despite direct expenditure of Rs 1,579.78 crore which also involved employing a large number of employees ranging from 40,000 to 71,000,” said the CAG report.

 

The report also highlighted the escalation of project cost in the process from Rs 288.18 crore in 2014 to Rs 1,602.66 crore eventually due to time overrun and significant change in scope of the initially conceptualised NRC updating software.

 

Who is to blame?

 

The CAG recommended fixing of responsibility on Hajela and action in a time bound manner for the excess, irregular and inadmissible payment made to the vendor chosen for selection and scrutiny of documents. It also suggested penal action against systems integrator (M/S Wipro Limited) for violation of Minimum Wages (MW) Act as payments were made to data entry operators at a rate less than minimum wages. The report sought accountability from Hajela for not ensuring compliance of MW Act.

 

What’s Hajela’s defence?

 

When India Today NE reached out to Hajela, the former NRC co-ordinator dismissed the CAG report. “There could not have been a better alternative to update the NRC under the given circumstances,” he says.

 

On charges of excess expenditure, Hajela said that every penny was accounted for. “It was an exercise owned by the Registrar General of India (RGI). The Union Finance Ministry did not release the entire amount in one go. Once the ministry was satisfied with the reports on previous expenditure, then only the next installment of fund was released. I could not spend money on my whims and fancies,” says Hajela.

 

In fact, it was Hajela, who had approached the Supreme Court in 2017 when APW chief Abhijit Sarma had levelled a corruption charge against the then NRC co-ordinator alleging a Rs 300 crore scam in the NRC updating process. It was claimed that while the government was paying Rs 15,000 for every data entry operator to Wipro, the company was paying only Rs 7,000 to every data entry operator employed.

 

As directed by the top court, Hajela submitted a detailed report on Sarma’s allegation following which the Supreme Court had initiated content procedure against Sarma. Hajela also wrote to Wipro about the low wages paid to the data entry operators. “Though I’m not accountable for how a vendor makes payment to its employees, I wrote to Wipro about the allegation and asked the company to follow statutory compliances,” says Hajela.

 

Hajela though admits one charge that the exercise was not planned well. “It’s true because it was an unprecedented exercise with no previous model. It was like climbing the Mount Everest. But before reaching the highest peak, we encountered several other peaks, which became visible only when we reached near those peaks,” says Hajela responding to the CAG’s assessment that software and utilities were developed haphazardly. But the IAS officer categorically asserts that not a single illegal citizen could find a place in the updated NRC.

 

What’s next on NRC?

 

The Assam NRC of the 1951 was updated to detect illegal immigrants. The final NRC list, published in August 2019, found that 1.9 million of the 33 million applicants in the state were not eligible for Indian citizenship.

 

Even after three years of its publication, the NRC list is yet to be notified by the Registrar General of India (RGI). Those who have been left out by the NRC continue to remain legal citizens of India and still can vote in elections.

 

The Assam government and several other private individuals and organisations, including the APW, have approached the Supreme Court seeking a review of the entire NRC exercise. All those petitions are pending before the apex court at present.

 

Justice Gogoi, in his book, maintained that there was an attempt from the executive to derail or delay the NRC updating process. He even wondered why no consequential action such as publication of the NRC had not been carried out. The political unwillingness took more than three decades to publish the NRC from the time it was first decided in 1985, when the Assam Accord was signed bringing an end to the six-year-long Assam Agitation against illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The new CAG report may have given the political establishment another opportunity to delay a closure on this contentious issue so that future electoral battles can be fought on this emotive issue.