The verification of citizenship documents of 29 lakh married women, mostly migrant Muslims, for the Supreme Court-monitored exercise to update the 1951 National Register of Citizens (NRC) will begin here on Monday.
This process will run simultaneously with the verification of 48 lakh cases of mismatches in family tree. About 45% of the family trees have been established since the exercise began on February 17.
The verification of family trees and the documents of married women has to be completed by May 31, the deadline set by the court for the 1.39 crore people left out of the first draft of the updated NRC published on December 31, 2017. The first draft had names of 1.9 crore people without doubt about their citizenship.
“We have engaged 2,759 investigators for verifying the documents of the 29 lakh married women across 1,093 NRC centres as per the SC judgement last year. Of these women, 9 lakh will be investigated for family tree too. Both exercises are being done at the same centres but by different sets of investigators,” Prateek Hajela, State NRC Coordinator, told The Hindu on Sunday.
Citizenship certificates
These women had submitted citizenship certificates issued by their local gram panchayat. The NRC investigators had marked these certificates inadmissible. The verification process, Mr. Hajela said, entails having a hearing-based system in which each married woman will be called to a location close to the gram panchayat from where she obtained her domicile certificate. The gram panchayat secretaries will also be called so that they can produce evidence on the basis of which they issued the certificates.
“The court had told us to do three things — check authenticity of their documents, look at the evidence based on which each certificate was issued originally, and give opportunity to the women to place her case,” he said.
The family tree verification is being done by 2,813 investigators who have already cleared 21.6 lakh of the 48 lakh doubtful family trees.
“It will take the investigators 900,000 hearings to verify all the remaining family tree mismatch cases,” Mr. Hajela said.
