Assam NRC Rejection Certificates to be Issued After 1 Month, Says Official

New Delhi: While anti-CAA-NRC-NPR protests continue across the country, the NRC authorities in Assam—the only state where the register of citizens has been updated—have said that the procedure of issuing rejection certificates to the 19 lakh people, whose names were excluded from the final National Register of Citizens, Assam, will begin after one month. The reasons for rejecting the applications of the people left out of the NRC would be mentioned in detail in the rejection slips.

“Some work like scanning of documents remains to be done. We hope to complete the remaining work within one month, after which we will start issuing the rejection certificates,” NRC Assam state coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma was quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

Following the issuing of these rejection certificates, the 19 lakh people who were left out of the NRC published in August last year would be required to present themselves in the foreigners’ tribunals (FTs) for proving their claims. There will be a 120-day period given from the date of issue of the rejection certificate to file their claims. The date from which the filing of appeals would be counted will be same for everyone, official sources had earlier said.

For this purpose, 200 new FTs have been set up by the state government, in addition to the existing 100 FTs, as per reports.

The Telegraph reported that sources in the state capital informed that they were waiting for the NRC authorities to issue the rejection certificates to start functioning of the tribunals. Reportedly, the members of the new tribunals, along with other employees, have also been appointed by the government.

“Besides these 300 FTs, the government is ready to start another 200 FTs. It had decided to start the new 200 FTs in December last year. However, the entire process hit a logjam when Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed in Parliament and subsequent protests took place in the state,” the report added.

Meanwhile, earlier last week, the government had asked teachers, who had been given release from NRC duty to rejoin to complete the pending work in some of the districts.

Around 55,000 government employees had been engaged in the NRC work, with teachers forming a major part of the workforce. A total of 828 contractual employees were also engaged in updating the NRC, who are now demanding regularisation of their jobs. “We have come to know that our jobs will remain till March 31. We have been working 16 to 18 hours every day for NRC update. We were engaged in administrative work. We have submitted a memorandum recently to chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal with the demand to appoint us in other departments,” said a member of NRC Employees’ Association.

A total of 3,30,27,661 people had applied for their names to be included in the NRC, out of which 3,11,21,004 were included while 19, 06,657 names were left out from the final list published on August 31, 2019.