Assam: 1.5 lakh foreigners to lose citizenship in NRC draft

Guwahati: With the NRC or the National Register of Citizens final drafting bound to completed by July 30, nearly 1.5 lakh people are bound to lose their citizenship and get included in the illegal immigrant listing.

These people were listed in the first part draft of the ongoing updating of NRC and will no longer be a part of second round of verification process of the July 30 draft of the NRC said the authorities on Tuesday, HT reported.

Previously the first draft submitted on December 31, 2017, included 1.9 crore names out of the 3.29 crore who applied. The NRC exercise or drafting is conducted to identify the illegal immigrants in Assam which was recently extended until July 30 by the SC following floods and other circumstances in the State.

As many as 65,694 families claims that have been found to be false in the second round of family verification, 48,456 cases of married women who submitted certificates issued by Gaon panchayats to prove their citizenship and 19,783 persons whose names were erroneously mentioned in the first draft will be excluded according to SC order which has led to question the credibility of the ongoing NRC exercise.

“How is it possible that names of 1.5 lakh foreigners were included in the first draft? Who are the responsible officers?” asked Tarun Gogoi, former chief minister.

“It just proves that the NRC exercise is not being done properly from the initial stage,” he added.

“How is it possible that despite the exercise having been started in 2015, there are still errors,” asked Aminul Islam, All Indian United Democratic Front General Secretary.

The exercise that began in 2015 engaged as many as 40,000 state government officials and outsourced data entry operators in the state for the first draft.

However, an NRC official, on condition of staying anonymous blamed “architecture of the whole exercise” for the errors.

Explaining the possible error fields, he said, some families failed to prove their family tree verification when brought together for joint verification while in the cases of Gaon panchayat certificates, the local officials verified some families without the publication of first draft.

Deciding on these foreigners, the SC in its order on July 2, said these people will not be a part of the final draft until their pending cases are
decided.

“It goes to the credit of the NRC authorities that we have been able to spot problems before the publication of the complete draft,” NRC state coordinater Prateek Hajela said.

According to an NRC official out of 1,26,000 D voters, over 63,000 have been identified, and out of another around 90,000 declared foreigners, another 4,500 have been identified so far.