Assam begins deleting foreigners from NRC list

Action being taken on persons designated by Foreigner Tribunals.

A man checks a NRC list at a verification centre in Assam’s Morigaon district on July 30, 2018.

 

District officials in Assam have begun work to delete the names of ‘declared foreigners’ whose names had been included in the complete draft of the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) that was published on July 30.

In central Assam’s Morigaon district, officials have identified some 200 people declared foreigners by various Foreigners’ Tribunals or facing cases related to their doubtful citizenship.

Assam has 100 such tribunals where people of suspect nationality are required to prove they are Indians.

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200 in Morigaon

“These 200 belong to 39 families scattered across the district. Some of them are declared foreigners while some others are suspected illegal immigrants with cases pending,” Morigaon Deputy Commissioner Hemen Das said.

“Their detection was not based on any complaint. A mechanism we have in place helped us find their names in the draft NRC. We are deleting their names from the list suo motu so that people don’t lose their faith in the system,” he said. However, he declined to reveal their names or their villages of residence for “security reasons”.

Fake papers in Hojai

The police in central Assam’s Hojai district too have filed charge-sheets against 91 people who had submitted fake documents while applying for NRC.

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“The civil administration had filed 24 cases against such people when the NRC first draft was being published. There papers were found to be forged,” the district’s Superintendent of Police Ankur Jain told The Hindu .

Some of these people have since obtained bail from the Gauhati High Court and the lower courts, he said.

NRC Assam’s State Coordinator Prateek Hajela had on July 2 submitted before the Supreme Court that some 1.5 lakh would be deleted from the first draft due to various anomalies. The first draft, published on December 31, 2017, had the names of 1.9 crore of a total 3.29 applicants.

The 1.5 lakh included 65,694 cases of “family tree mismatch” while 48,456 cases were of married women who had submitted doubtful panchayat certificates. Another 19,783 were left out because of data entry errors.