A day after the NRC authority accepted non-renewal of its contract with Wipro on time as the cause for all data vanishing from official website, an RTI application was filed on Wednesday with the National Informatics Centre, seeking details of the pact with the IT firm.
Though NRC authority denied any wrong doing in all data going offline and put the blame of non-timely renewal to the earlier NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela, opposition Congress has alleged it as ‘malafide’ and ‘deliberate’ action.
While the Centre assured all that the data is safe and termed the data going offline as ‘technical issues’, IT service provider Wipro said authorities concerned did not renew the services contract for the project after it expired.
Social media went berserk after the news broke with netizens strongly criticising the NRC Authority’s ‘negligence’ in handling the sensitive data, which contained the list of exclusion and inclusion of bonafide Indian citizens and were uploaded on its official website ‘www.nrcassam.nic.in’ after the final list was published on August 31, 2019.
Senior journalist-cum-RTI activist Saket Gokhale filed an RTI application to the NIC, the IT wing of the government, and made it public through his twitter account.
He sought a copy of the contract with Wipro regarding online hosting and storage of the official NRC list of Assam.
“Please provide name and details of the company used for cloud storage of the Assam NRC list along with the contract signed with it thereof,” the RTI requested.
Gokhale also sought all the relevant files pertaining to the contract renewal along with all official correspondence with Wipro and the cloud storage company.
In a separate tweet, the RTI activist questioned the NRC Authority’s decision to host the mammoth data on a private cloud service when the Government has its own such platform.
“What’s even more murkier is that govt-owned NIC has its own cloud service called Meghraj. Why the hell was the Assam NRC data stored on the Amazon AWS cloud when a domestic govt- owned option was freely available?” Gokhale tweeted.
He shared a screenshot from Wipro’s official website that talks about putting in place a “state-of-the-art fluid data center at Guwahati”.