National Register of Citizens for Assam


The National Register of Citizens for Assam is a registry meant to be maintained by the Government of India for the state of Assam. It is expected to contain the names and certain relevant information for the identification of genuine Indian citizens in the state. The register for Assam was first prepared after the 1951 Census of India. Since then it was not updated until the major "updation exercise" conducted during 2013–2019, which caused numerous difficulties. In 2019, the government also declared its intention of creating such a registry for the whole of India, leading to major protests all over the country.
After the independence of India, the Indian parliament passed the Immigration Act of 1950 due to the concern that Assam was getting indundated with migrants from East Bengal, which had then become part of Pakistan. The first National Register of Citizens was prepared in 1951 in order to implement the Act. However, nothing was accomplished because The Foreigners Act of 1946 did not treat Pakistanis as "foreigners" and they could come and go as they pleased.
The process of updating Assam's part of NRC started in 2013 when the Supreme Court of India passed an order for it to be updated. Since then, the Supreme Court monitored it continuously. The entire process was conducted by Prateek Hajela, an IAS, who has been designated as the State Coordinator of National Registration, Assam.
The final updated NRC for Assam, published 31 August 2019, contained 31 million names out of 33 million population. It left out about 1.9 million applicants, who seem to be divided roughly equally between Bengali Hindus, Bengali Muslims and other Hindus from various parts of India.
In December 2022, audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India revealed several irregularities in the National Register of Citizens in Assam, such as, exclusion of several indigenous people of Assam, irregularities in utilization of funds in the process and choosing software for the task. The project cost increased from Rs 288.18 crore in 2014 to Rs 1,602.66 crore by March 2022.
The Government of Bangladesh has indicated that Bangladesh is prepared to take back any of its citizens residing in India if evidence is offered.

Background

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Colonial Assam witnessed intermittent migration of populace from rest of the provinces of British India in the aftermath of the Yandabo treaty which brought the region under the control of British. The liberal colonial authorities encouraged the migration of peasants from Bengal to Assam in search of fertile lands. As early as 1931, C.S. Mullan, the Census Superintendent in his census report stated:

After 1950

This migration surged, especially that of Hindu Bengali people, from East Pakistan after India's independence and subsequent partition into two separate countries namely the secular India and Muslim Pakistan. Following the Partition of India, Pakistan consisted of two isolated landmasses, Pakistan to the west of India and East Pakistan, to the East. Demarcation was loose and without any robust physical barrier or fencing between East Pakistan and India.
Post Partition, East Pakistan suffered from political turmoil and witnessed civil unrest which finally led to a civil war and separation of East Pakistan from Pakistan and a new country Bangladesh came into being consisting of all the geographical area of erstwhile East Pakistan. There occurred mass exodus of population from the war-torn regions into the Indian side and most of these refugees never returned. Excerpts from the White Paper on Foreigners' Issue published by the Home and Political Department, Government of Assam on 20 October 2012 – Chapter 1, Historical Perspective,.section 1.2 reads:
Even after the end of civil war and the formation of Bangladesh, migration continued, though illegally. The Government of India already had in its stock of statutes, the Immigrants Act, 1950. This act came into effect from 1 March 1950 which mandated expulsion of illegal immigrants from the state of Assam. To identify illegal immigrants, the National Register of Citizens was prepared for the first time in Assam during the conduct of 1951 Census. It was carried out under a directive of the Ministry of Home Affairs by recording particulars of every single person enumerated during that Census. Practical implementation of the act was difficult and the measures taken under this act proved ineffective largely due to the vast stretch of the open border between the countries and illegal immigrants pushed out of India at one point of it could easily infiltrate again at some other unmanned point. The issue of illegal infiltration was becoming formidable problem in the state of Assam as migrants enjoyed political patronage. The Registrar General of Census in his report on 1961 Census assessed 2,20,691 infiltrators to have entered Assam.
In the year 1965, the government of India took up with the government of Assam to expedite completion of the National Register of Citizens and to issue National Identity Cards on the basis of this register to Indian citizens towards the identification of illegal immigrants. But in 1966 the Central Government dropped the proposal to issue identity cards in consultation with the Government of Assam, having found the project impracticable.
In a notification issued by the Government of India in the year 1976, the State government was instructed not to deport persons coming from Bangladesh to India prior to March 1971. Thus between 1948 and 1971, there were large scale migrations from Bangladesh to Assam.

Assam Accord 1985

Given this continuing influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh into Assam, suddenly a group of student leaders in 1979 came out in fierce protest demanding detention, disenfranchisement and deportation of illegal immigrants from Assam. They cited unexplained surge of electors in the voter lists for the assembly constituencies in certain pockets of the state, specially in those under then undivided Darrang District of Assam & elsewhere in the districts of lower & central Assam, for which they suspected large scale entry of names of foreigners or illegal migrants in those lists. The events quickly developed into a mass movement which came to be known as Assam Agitation or Assam Movement led by All Assam Students’ Union and All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad and lasted 6 years. The movement culminated in the signing of a landmark Memorandum of Settlement - the Assam Accord, between the agitating parties & the Union of India on 15 August 1985, at the behest of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi.
The Accord ended the agitation but could not end the illegal migration. Further it had a negotiated defect which called for 1 January 1966 to be the precise date based on which the detection illegal immigrants in Assam would take place and thus ironically allowing Indian citizenship for all persons coming to the territorial limits of the present-day state of Assam from "Specified Territory" prior to that date.

Other New Acts

Along with the Accord came a new Illegal Migrants Act, 1983 which described a controversial procedure to detect illegal immigrants and their expulsion from the state of Assam. Indian Citizenship Act, 1955 was accordingly amended almost immediately to incorporate provisions by dint of the accord. The act further specified that all persons who came to Assam between to 1 January 1966 and up to 24 March 1971 shall be detected in accordance with the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Foreigners Order, 1964. The name of foreigners so detected would be deleted from the Electoral Rolls in force. Such persons will be required to register themselves before the Registration Officers of the respective districts in accordance with the provisions of the Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939 and the Registration of Foreigners Rules, 1939. Foreigners who came to Assam on or after 25 March 1971 shall continue to be detected, deleted and expelled in accordance with law.

Pilot Project 2010

The process of detecting and expelling immigrants suffered from problems for a considerable amount of time. The first attempt of systematically detecting foreigners by updating the National Register in Assam was through a Pilot Project which was started in 2 circles, one in Kamrup district and another in Barpeta district in the year 2010, which had to be aborted within 4 weeks amidst a huge law and order problem involving a mob attack on the Office of the IAS Commissioner, Barpeta that resulted in police firing killing 4 persons. For a long time, since the bitter experience in the pilot project, NRC update was considered almost an impossible task by the government agencies.

Role of the Supreme Court

However, the task was again finally taken up at the behest of the Supreme Court of India’s order in the year 2013 in regards to two writ petitions filed by Assam Public Works and Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha & Ors. wherein the Supreme Court, headed by the bench of Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman, mandated the Union Government and the State Government to complete the updation of NRC, in accordance with Citizenship Act, 1955 and Citizenship Rules, 2003, in all parts of Assam. Pursuant to the directive of the apex Court, the Registrar General of India via its notification Number S.O. 3591 E dated 6 December 2013 notified commencing of NRC updation.
Since then, the Supreme Court of India has been closely monitoring the process and holding regular hearings on representations made to it by various interested parties and stakeholders. To make the process of NRC update smooth, the Supreme Court in its order dated 21 July 2015 passed the following directions:

Final NRC

Methodology

The mechanism adopted to update the NRC 1951 has been developed from scratch because there is no precedence of such a mammoth task ever undertaken in India or elsewhere that involved identification of genuine citizens and detection of illegal immigrants using technology since it involved data of over 3 crore people and over 6.6 crore documents. The guidelines under which NRC Update has been taken up is as follows –
The process of NRC update is divided into the following phases:
  1. Publication of Legacy Data
  2. Distribution & Receipt of Application Form
  3. Verification Process
  4. Publication of Part Draft NRC
  5. Complete Publication of Draft NRC
  6. Receipt and Disposal of Claims & Objections
  7. Publication of Final NRC