Additional list to draft National Register of Citizens excludes over a lakh people

Guwahati: As the additional list to the draft National Register of Citizens in Assam is released on Wednesday, it can be seen that a good number of people have been excluded from the list. The number of people excluded from the draft NRC goes up by over a lakh.

Office of the state coordinator of the NRC states, “As per provisions contained in Clause 5 of the Schedule of Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Card) Rules, 2003, an additional draft list consisting of 1,02,462 has been published today.”

The statement has also categorically mentioned the reasons behind the exclusion of the people from the list and these are being classified into three types of reasons. The first reason for exclusion states that those who are declared foreigner, doubtful voter or persons with cases pending at Foreigners Tribunals or their descendants are excluded from the list. Second reason states that persons who appeared as a witness in hearings held for disposal of claims and objections were found to be ineligible. The third reason states those persons who appeared to be ineligible during the process of verification. The verification and claims and objections chances were provided after the publication draft NRC on July 30, 2018.

The additional list of draft NRC is published to include those people in the final list who were left excluded from the draft. Once the final list of the NRC will be published, the illegal foreigners in the state will be weed out.

The Supreme Court of India which is monitoring the functioning of the NRC, had ordered to keep the declared foreigners and their descendants out of the NRC. But other people such as the doubtful voters and persons with their cases pending in foreigners tribunals were asked to be kept in the hold as their cases are yet to be decided by the tribunals.

The draft NRC was first published on July 30, 2018 which had excluded more than 4 lakh people.

Also read: Additional list to complete draft NRC to be published today