Assam NRC data safe despite technical issues on cloud, says home ministry; clarifies glitches will be resolved soon

New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday said the NRC 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 National Register of Citizens has been made offline from its official website. “The NRC data is safe. Some technical issues are in visibility on the 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. [caption id=“attachment_5636661” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] An NRC centre in Assam. Reuters[/caption] 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 19 October last year. However, this was not renewed by the previous coordinator. So, the data got offline from 15 December after it was suspended by Wipro, Sarma said. He said the state coordination committee had decided to do necessary formalities in its meeting on 30 January and wrote to the Wipro during the first week of February. “Once Wipro makes the data live, it will be available for 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 31 August 2019. The final NRC was published by excluding 19,06,657 persons. A total of 3,11,21,004 names were included out of 3,30,27,661 applicants. After the earlier NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela relinquished the charge on November 11 following his transfer to home state Madhya Pradesh on a direction from the Supreme Court, Sarma was appointed in his place on 9 November.