Lukewarm response to NRC document verification by other states

Lukewarm response to NRC document verification by other states

Staff Reporter

Guwahati, April 16: Despite the Supreme Court’s directive to the chief secretaries of all states and union territories to expedite NRC document verification of those who submitted documents from outside the State, the response has been lukewarm. This is despite the urgency of the NRC update work in the State.
On March 27, the Supreme Court had directed all chief secretaries to send the results of the verification of the documents issued by their states and union territories to NRC State Coordinator of Assam so that the process of upgrade of the NRC in the State could be completed within the time schedule. Likewise, the apex court had also issued directions to the various issuing authorities of the banks concerned, UIDAI (Aadhar), CBSE, Ministry of External Affairs, and various central and state government departments to send their verification reports to the Assam NRC Coordinator.
The court had also permitted the State NRC Coordinator to complete the process of investigation through investigations by district magistrates through house-to-house re-verification that should be completed by May 31 this year.
Talking to The Sentinel on Monday, State NRC Coordinator Prateek Hajela said, “We’re awake to the situation and are readying for our task. By the first week of May we’ll see if verification documents from other states and union territories arrive. If we don’t receive any, we’ll get the work done through district magistrates’ verification as suggested by the Supreme Court because all such verification will have to be done on or before May 31. As per the apex court’s directive, the second and final NRC draft has to be published on June 30.”
Hajela recently submitted before the Supreme Court that about 10.76 lakh documents were yet to be verified by different issuing authorities and the results of verification were  awaited from the issuing authorities. Out of 10.76 lakh documents, results of 4.42 lakh are to be received from various districts in Assam. Results of 2.37 lakh documents are also yet to be received from other issuing authorities such as banks, UIDAI (Aadhaar), CBSE, Ministry of External Affairs, various central and state government departments, he said.     
On other hand, Hajela informed the Supreme Court that about 3.97 lakh documents are yet to be verified by various states. There has been a zero per cent verification of documents by states like Chhattisgarh and union territories of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Lakshadweep and Poducherry.  States like Bihar, Delhi and West Bengal have so far verified only 6 to 7 per cent of documents sent to them. Even northeastern states are not doing well in verifying NRC documents with Manipur having completed just 2.82 per cent verification, he stated.
Out of 5,72, 809 documents sent to various states, the NRC authority here has received verification results of only 1,75,479 documents, keeping it waiting for responses of 3,97,330 documents. So going by statistics, only 30 per cent of documents have been verified by other states. 
The first part draft NRC was published on the expiry of the midnight of December 31 last year.

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