Supreme Court eases documents bar, extends deadline for NRC

pgangwani35

In a significant order that could help 40 lakh people excluded from the draft Assam  National Register of Citizens (NRC) to seek inclusion of their names, the Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed them to substantiate their pleas by attaching any acceptable citizenship document and extended the deadline for filing claims till December 31.
Earlier, most of the documents permitted to be cited as evidence of citizenship had a cut-off date of March 24, 1971. On a plea by All Assam Minority Students Union represented by Kapil Sibal, a bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice R F Nariman said, “We direct the NRC authority to accept List B documents that are found to be legally valid, regardless of the date of issuance of the same. Naturally, such acceptance would be on adequate and full satisfaction of the concerned NRC authority who would be free to act on the basis of such satisfaction.”
The Assam government, through solicitor general Tushar Mehta, had sought extension of the December 15 deadline by one month. Mehta also pleaded that sample verification of NRC data could be made 20% instead of 10%. However, the SC said that plea could wait.
State NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela informed the court that claims applications, which were a few thousand a day in October-November, had become a deluge and had touched 2-3 lakh daily in the last two-three days. Till December 11, 14.8 lakh applications had been received, Hajela said.
As the court extended the deadline for filing claims to December 31, it consequently extended the date for start of verification of the claims and objections from February 1 to February 15.
The bench said, “We direct that to facilitate filing of objections... copies of draft NRC be made available for inspection of all concerned at convenient locations. We further direct that so far as filing of objections are concerned, the same may be done at the district headquarters.


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