Acquiring PRC a Herculean task

Vikram Sharma

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Tribune News Service

Jammu, August 3

Procuring Permanent Resident Certificate (PRC) has become an uphill task in J&K as the new rules have burdened people with producing long list of documents, which they generally fail to collect and most of them abandon the process midway.

Earlier, the documents required were as simple as producing a state subject of father or a land holding record to be submitted at the District Magistrate office, which acted as the basis of issuing a PRC to the aspirant.

The new rules include nearly 20 documents to be attached, most of which are either impossible to acquire from different departments or have been perished in government records.

A person or a family not having a land holding of pre-1947 is at the biggest loss in getting their subjects’ PRC made. Besides, attachments such as voter list of 1951, 1957 and 2014 have become a pre-requisite for applying for a PRC. The exercise ends before starting even as a rude reply from single window operator at Assistant Chief Electoral Office says that ‘records are missing’.

Krishan Lal, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer, Public Grievance Redressal Officer (PGRO), had admitted to The Tribune that some of the records had been either mutilated or perished. “Only recently I have directed my joint directors at Jammu as well as in Kashmir to take up early digitisation of records,” he had said.

As per sources, no initiative has been taken up yet. The other biggest impediment is acquiring the land holding record. Certified copies of Misal Haqiyat Jamabandi/Shajra Nasab prior to 1944 AD and current revenue record, viz. Jamabani/Khasra Girdawari and Shajra, is required to be attached with the application.

“We sold our ancestral land long back and don’t have any record. How can we produce the original papers of the land as tracing the buyer is impossible, who could have sold it to other buyer and so on,” said Mangat Ram Dubey at Janipur, who wants PRC of his grandchild.

However, in a written representation made to CEC, New Delhi as well as CEO, J&K, BJP MLC Ramesh Arora, who recently took up the cause of public grievances on the PRCs, put forth that the reconstruction of missing records by secondary evidence should be made and a list of secondary evidence should be admitted as an alternative to voters’ list record prior to 1951, 1957 and so on where it is missing.

There is a hierarchical line of corruption in the department. One cannot move even a single document forward, without following the hierarchy,” alleged another aspirant at Gandhi Nagar.