State Coordinator of National Register of Citizens (NRC), Prateek Hajela on Tuesday said that the State is fully prepared to publish the final draft of the NRC on July 30 next.
Talking to NEZINE, Hajela assured that he and his team are ‘absolutely prepared’ to abide by the Supreme Court orders of publishing the final NRC draft on July 30.
He further exuded confidence that all the necessary work will be completed within the stipulated time.
Hajela said one of the main challenges while updating the NRC was determining the eligibility of citizenship of each and every individual.
He said there were around 3.3 crore applicants and tracing the history of citizenship till March 24, 1971 was an uphill task as it required verifying documents of descendants and the lineage of family tree.
He also said that as similar exercise has never been done in any part of the world, the task was even more challenging without any precedence.
He said it was quite a challenge to make the documents available for the citizens – by process of digitizing the documents and translating the same into Assamese and the same were made available in all the NRC Seva Kendras across the State.
Hajela further said that the next challenge was to verify the authenticity of the submitted documents of the applicants.
He said the only reliable source was the issuing authority to avoid forgery.
“We had to send these documents of quite a number of applicants to various states within the country and also abroad for verification which was quite a challenge,” he said.
Hajela also admitted around one crore people had to move across the state for the family tree hearing as the descendants are spread across the State over the span of time.
He also expressed his gratitude to the people saying that there were hardly any complaints from the people in this regard.
Regarding exclusion of around 1.5 lakh names from the first draft published on December 31, 2017, Hajela said that it is because there were some discrepancies regarding verification of the family tree during publication of the first draft because of paucity of time.
“The truth of family was revealed only when we started conducting the family tree hearing,” he asserted.
He further said that both claims and objections will be entertained through hearings after the publication of the final draft of NRC on July 30 next.
He also assured that standard procedure will be followed with high end technical expertise to protect the huge date base created during the entire process of updating of the NRC during his conversation with NEZINE.