NRC: Assam moves SC to conduct sample verification in districts bordering B’desh

Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 16

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Two weeks before the July 31 deadline for publication of final National Register of Citizens (NRC), Assam has asked the Supreme Court to allow it to conduct sample re-verification of 20 per cent of the draft NRC published on July 30 last year districts bordering Bangladesh. 

The Final Draft NRC list published on July 30 last year left out 40,70,707 people of the state’s 3.29 crore population. Of those left out, 37,59,630 names had been rejected and the remaining 2,48,077 were put on hold.

Thereafter, a massive exercise with regard to claims and objections has been undertaken under the supervision of the top court to decide the fate of those left out or wrongly included and the top court has fixed July 31 for publication of final NRC in Assam.

On Tuesday, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta requested a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi to extend the July 31 deadline but the Bench was non-committal. “We will see,” it told Mehta.

In a recent application, the Assam Government said such an exercise was essential in view of allegations of bribery playing a key role in the inclusion of several names despite such persons being declared as illegal foreigners by the designated tribunals.

It pointed out that on August 28, the top court had said: “We are of the view that the court should consider the necessity of carrying out the sample re-verification of at least 10 per cent of the names included in the final draft NRC, if require”.

Though the top court did not pass any subsequent orders for re-verification, it was necessary to weed out illegal migrants as otherwise the final NRC, which would be a futile exercise, the state government said.

“There have been several instances where foreigners who were detected and declared as such by Tribunals have been included in the Draft NRC. Even cases where declared foreigners having been engaged as NRC official, have also come to light."

“Recently instances of asking of bribe by NRC officials for inclusion of names in final NRC have also come to light.  In border districts, where incidents of migration are more and in certain other districts that registered a higher population growth as per 2011 Census, there have been very high ratio of inclusions and consequently negligible exclusions whereas, the exclusions are comparatively high in ratio in parts of the State with high percentage of indigenous population."

“In addition to the above representations, there have been media reports about complaints of indigenous organizations regarding wrong exclusion of indigenous people from the final draft NRC,” Assam Government said.