Burning Issue: Assam NRC Final List Out, 19 Lakh People Excluded

What is this Assam NRC Issue? Who are excluded from the Assam NRC List? if all these questions related to the latest Assam NRC Issue are bugging you and you want to know about it from scratch then keep on reading because in this edition of Burning Issues we are discussing All You Need to Know about Assam NRC.

What is Assam NRC?

To quote the information on Assam Government’s Official website, “The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the register containing names of Indian Citizens. The only time that a National Register of Citizens (NRC) was prepared was in 1951 when after the conduct of the Census of 1951, the NRC was prepared by recording particulars of all the persons enumerated during that Census.” Thus for an individual’s name to be updated in the NRC, the person needs to meet the following criteria:

To cut the long story short, NRC is a list of genuine citizens of this nation. Now you know why it is a burning issue as all those whose name is not included in the NRC have a big question mark on their Indian Nationality. Agenda of NRC- to identify the foreigners who are residing illegally in the state.

Since the Assam Accord signed in 1985, the task of updating the NRC has been pending for years and now on 31st August the government has updated and released the NRC, after the Supreme Court took up the matter and directed the govt to complete it in the deadline. 

The process to update the NRC started in May 2015 and the applications were stopped in August 2015. The verification process started in September 2015 and as per the data reported in various newspapers near about 3.29 crore applicants had submitted their name for listing in the NRC.

What is the latest update?

The government has released the NRC on 31st August and more than 3.11 crore people have been included in the final National Register of Citizens and around 19 lakh people have been left out.

This is the biggest exercise by India to weed out Bangladeshi immigrants and their descendants, who might have settled illegally in the country.

What about those whose names are not in NRC?

Those who find their names are not included in the NRC can approach the Foreigners Tribunals over the next 120 days. If a person is not satisfied with the Foreigner’s Tribunal’s decision he or she can also appeal against it. The govt. has also set up detention camps across the state to accommodate disenfranchised  (those excluded from the NRC) people.