Assam government appoints Partha Pratim Mazumdar as new NRC coordinator

The Assam government on Saturday appointed Partha Pratim Mazumdar as the new National Register of Citizens (NRC) coordinator for the state.

Mazumdar was serving as Registrar, Cooperative Societies, Assam and Secretary to the Government of Assam, Women and Child Development Department.

“Partha Pratim Mazumdar, IAS (SCS 2010) Registrar, Cooperative Societies, Assam and Secretary to the Government of Assam, Women and Child Development Department (Additional) is transferred and posted as Secretary to the Government of Assam, Home and Political Department and State Coordinator, National Register of Citizens (NRC), Assam and i/c Directorate of NRC, Assam vice Hitesh Dev Sarma IAS (SCS 2009) attaining his superannuation on 31-07-2022,” an official notification stated.


With this appointment, Mazumdar will replace Hitesh Dev Sarma, retiring on July 31.

Sarma in May last year had filed a petition in the Supreme Court, seeking comprehensive and time-bound reverification of the drafted NRC and the supplementary list under the supervision of a monitoring committee preferably represented by the respective district judge, district magistrate and superintendent of police in every district.

In 2020, he had alleged that the RGI was silent on the NRC anomalies process. Instead of giving direction on how to rectify the same, the RGI had asked NRC authorities to wind up the operation of updation of NRC by issuing rejection slips, he had said.

NRC is an exercise to weed out illegal immigrants and is monitored by the Supreme Court. Around 3.30 crore people had applied for inclusion in the NRC, but the names of nearly 40 lakhs of them were excluded in the draft NRC published on July 30, 2018.

The supplementary NRC list had found more than 31.1 million people eligible to be included in the registry and left out over 1.9 million people.