New Delhi: Completion of gigantic task of updating National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam has been very arduous but this has brought applaud to IAS officer Prateek Hajela, who was entrusted with the responsibility of doing this from past six years.

Hajela, an IIT-Delhi alumnus, put together his team that oversaw this Rs 1,200 crore process involving over 55,000 officials and more than 6.64 crore documents. Appointed as the state coordinator in September 2013 on the recommendations of the then Congress government, Hajela was serving as the managing director of the National Rural Health Mission.

Hajela completely involved himself in this exercise after the Supreme Court bench started seeking regular updates from both the state and the Centre. NRC process saw many innovations devised by the team to verify roughly 3.29 crore applicants and Hajela was closely involved in designing most of them.

Family tree verification to check was one such device to ensure if anyone has wrongly used documents of another family. The process saw officials match a computer-generated family tree with the handwritten one and subjecting mismatches to elaborate hearings where all the members had to come together at one centre. He was also closely involved in the firming up of over 53 software applications that made up the backbone of the verification process.