Image Courtesy: cnbctv18.com
Did Wipro know that the all-India National Register of Citizens (NRC) was going to be an inevitable reality for the country? The company played a key role in the contentious NRC project in Assam and had even put it up on its website stating how it had partnered with the state government to update the NRC, leading to 100% enrolment of Indian citizens.
However, yesterday it seemed to have felt the jitters, just like the rest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the wake of the increasing protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the NRC throughout the country.
The company first deleted the page and restored it a few hours later. Various publications reached out to Wipro asking the reason for both, deleting and then re-installing the page, but the company did not issue a statement.
One must note that when the system integration tenders for the Assam NRC were floated in 2014, Wipro was the only firm to make a bid for the same.
According to the page titled: Digital Governance: Achieving Citizen Enrolment in Record Time, the company stated, “Assam has been grappling with the issue of undocumented immigration since independence. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) was first prepared in 1951 to document the names of Indian Citizens in Assam.”
It read, “There has been a long-standing demand for updating the NRC 1951 as a result of growing infiltration.” The challenge with the Assam NRC it said, wasn’t just the “short window for updating the records, but also the poor availability of legacy data related to Indian citizens and/or their descendants (prior to -24 March, 1971).”
It said that the government needed a data center that would deploy IT and non-IT infrastructure, including manpower, to receive offline applications at NRC Seva Kendras (NSK). The NSKs were in difficult terrains and extensive use of IT was required to shorten the timeframe.
How did Wipro help?
It deployed “Document Segregation and Meta Data Entry (DOCSMEN)” — a software that sliced and segregated nearly 6.6 crore people’s information.
Wipro stated that it developed bespoke business intelligence and case management solutions to receive offline and online applications. It provided training and deployed more than 8,000 data entry operators to the state government. It generated a family tree listing of all applicants with the help of software and helped the Assam government with breakthrough micromanagement systems — daily reporting and dashboard, map-based analysis of results, etc.
However, Wipro found itself landing into many controversies with regards to the project. The Labor Commissionerate of Assam slapped a lawsuit against it for not obtaining the mandatory contract labour license, which it had implemented in association with a local firm Integrated Systems Services (ISS). Eight data entry operators had approached the Labour Commissionerate with a complaint alleging that each of them were being paid only Rs. 5,050 every month against the sum of Rs. 14,500 earmarked by the government.
It seems like the company took down the post after PM Modi’s rally where he seemed to contradict his party’s stand regarding implementing an all-India NRC. But, the page was restored soon. It must be noted that today, on December 24, 2019, the Union Cabinet approved a proposal to update the National Population Register (NPR) that is linked to the Census.
This is seen to be the first step to implement the nation-wide NRC. Is this why Wipro restored their work regarding the Assam NRC, so that they could get a fillip for the all-India NRC implementation?
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