An Assamese Girl Could Not Apply For A Government Job Because Her Surname Is Chutia 

The world is slowly going online in almost every aspect whether it is applying for job, making reservations, making financial transactions, shopping for essential items like groceries and clothes, paying bills and so on. However with this new system comes new problems and a woman from Assam faced problem in applying for a job because the software was not accepting her surname. Sounds weird but true!

Priyanka Chutia was not able to apply for a job in the National Seed Corporation Limited (NSCL) as the software was rejecting her surname every time she tried to apply. The software was asking Priyanka to use an appropriate word rather than a slang as ‘Chutia’ is an abusive word in Hindi language.

Priyanka who is basically from Gogamukh town has done her masters in Agricultural Economics and Farm Management. When she got frustrated to the extreme limits, she decided to talk about this issue on the social media site Facebook.  In her post, she has written about being not able to apply for a job online due to her surname and how frustrated she feels at times as she is tired of telling people that her surname is not slang, it is the name of the community to which she belongs. She has also asked her community members to do something about it and urged to take some steps in this direction rather than wasting time on petty issues.

Here is the post which was made by Priyanka Chutia on Facebook:

Priyanka has deleted the post now from the platform but the good thing is that she wrote to NSCL about the problem after which the organization took needful steps and her application was accepted. One of the reasons behind this incident taking place is the fact that even the organizations such as NSCL don’t have much knowledge about the North-Eastern parts of India. However when NSCL was questioned about it by a local news portal, the organization stated that the unfortunate incident happened due a technical glitch and their team is working to resolve the issue.

The Chutia community from Assam is one of the oldest communities of the state and its pronunciation differs from expletive as it is spoken as Sutiya. This community has its shares of battles with the digital platforms as the accounts of many members have been deleted citing the surname as slang.

What can be done in order to resolve this issue? Do you have any suggestion?