Forged birth certificates continue to remain a big menace in Assam, and, believe it or not, even government doctors who are supposed to be gazetted officers are also said to be involved in rackets that manufacture such fake documents. The latest incident is the detection of a fake birth certificate racket operating in the Sonitpur district, with reports saying that the police have discovered the issuance of several hundred such fake documents from just one primary health centre alone. As has been reported on the front page of the Sunday edition of this newspaper, it has been suspected that there could be such rackets active in government health centres in other districts of the state too. Assam has a little over 1,000 primary health centres, and there is no guarantee that unscrupulous elements, including doctors, as has happened in the particular primary health centre in Sonitpur, have not indulged in such criminal activities in those too. Fake birth certificates were, however, particularly active in Assam when the preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was in full swing. According to media reports that quoted NRC officials and police, several lakh fake birth certificates had been submitted by applicants belonging to a particular community in order to prove their citizenship credentials, which would make them eligible for inclusion in the NRC. According to media reports dating back to the period when the NRC was being prepared, the authorities had detected over one lakh applications in which the applicants had submitted fake birth certificates and other related documents. The police had then arrested a number of people from different districts, mostly health department employees, who had provided fake birth certificates to people with doubtful citizenship in exchange for huge sums of money. One such racket was active in the Morigaon district, where the district authorities, upon receipt of allegations, had inquired and found that most of the birth certificates were issued in the name of a particular primary health centre. There were also reports of the manufacturing of duplicate birth certificates issued with duplicate seals and serial numbers at different health centres. What happened to those applications in which the submission of fake birth certificates was detected, however, is not known. But the suspicion continues to remain strong that the names of a large number of people of doubtful citizenship status, who are either direct infiltrators from neighbouring Bangladesh or are descendents of illegal migrants, have found a place in the NRC. No wonder there are currently allegations that the entire process of preparing the NRC itself was a scandal.