GUWAHATI, Aug 10 - Several leading personalities here, including some former senior bureaucrats, plead for making the lists of those excluded from the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) public at the circle and district levels.
They maintain that such lists are important to identify the people excluded from the NRC. In the absence of such lists, some politically motivated circles have been trying to defame the people of Assam by projecting the NRC update process as a parochial one.
It is claimed by these circles that all the 4,07,707 people excluded from the final draft of the NRC are the people of Bangla origin, who have been living in Assam for decades. By updating the NRC, they are sought to be made stateless like the Palestinians or the Rohingiyas.
But the fact remained that the names of many people belonging to the State�s indigenous groups, besides a huge chunk of the old Nepali settlers and the ex-tea garden communities, have been excluded from the final draft of the NRC.
One of the major factors for these people�s names not figuring in the final draft of the NRC is that they were not made aware of the fact that it is their duty to move the NRC authorities to get their names included in the citizens� register. Moreover, there are around 10 lakh indigenous people whose villages are yet to be covered by cadastral surveys.
It is widely alleged that huge number of people belonging to the migrant communities were allowed to man the NRC Seva Kendras (NSKs) as data entry operators, etc. in the migrant-dominated areas and an organised move was there in such areas to collect the relevant documents, which was found absent in other areas. It is commonly feared that many of the documents produced and accepted in such NSKs were of doubtful nature.
Sources said people in the interior, remote and non-cadastral areas of Sadiya, Dhemaji, Majuli, two hills districts, large areas of the Bodoland Territorial Administrative Districts (BTAD), habitations in the forest and inter-State border areas do not have any land documents and other important documents.
Now, it is stated by the NRC authorities that who did not apply initially cannot submit claim applications. But Section 4 (3) of the NRC Regulations has made it amply clear that the NRC authorities can suo motu take up verification of the entries before publication of the final NRC.
It is therefore, quite natural to expect from the NRC authorities that they will take up the indigenous people's cases under this section for inclusion of their names in the final NRC, said the leading personalities.
