What is his background?
Mr. Hajela, 48, hails from a prominent family of Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. His father S.P. Hajela was a Madhya Pradesh civil service officer and his elder brother Anoop Hajela is a leading doctor in Bhopal. His uncle P.D. Hajela was a renowned economist, who served as Vice-Chancellor of Allahabad University and Sagar University in Madhya Pradesh.
A 1995 batch IAS officer of the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, he did his B. Tech in Electronics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1992. As Home Commissioner, he handled the aftermath of an ethnic cleansing in 2013, and was later appointed Special Commissioner for emergency operations. He received the Chief Minister’s award for transparency in the recruitment of more than 5,000 police constables. But these did not attract as much attention as his stewardship of the NRC updating exercise since September 5, 2013.
What challenges did he face?
Mr. Hajela and his team had to create their own model of updating the NRC as there was no precedent anywhere in India, apart from a failed pilot project in Assam’s Barpeta and Chhaygaon undertaken in 2010. The problem in the 1951 NRC was that it was a reproduction of that year’s census without any citizenship check. Besides, Rule 4A — the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules of 2003 — for Assam meant that people had to apply, unlike in other States where officers go house to house to enumerate.
He created the mechanism to be implemented, and the first major step was the development of the legacy data, where applicants have to submit the 1971 NRC or pre-1971 electoral roll (mandated by the Assam Accord that sets March 24, 1971, as the cut-off date for detecting and deporting illegal migrants) that they would search for.
Digitisation of the exercise was the next hurdle, followed by building a team of 68,000 government officials and contractual workers and specialists to run the NRC Secretariat in Guwahati and some 2,500 Nagarik Seva Kendras across the State.
Forming the base took almost two years before the verification process began on September 1, 2015. He claims the entire exercise is technology-driven and transparent with enough safeguards for Indian citizens and a grievance redress mechanism.