The Supreme Court on Tuesday extended the deadline for publication of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by a month to August 31.
However, the Centre and Assam governments suffered a setback as the court rejected their plea for 20 per cent sample re-verification of names included in the draft NRC from the districts bordering Bangladesh.
The court had earlier fixed July 31 as the date for finalisation of the NRC, whose draft publication in July last year resulted in the elimination of over 40 lakh names from the citizenship data. The apex court today also fixed for August 8 hearing of grievances of those descendants/claimants whose parent had been declared a foreign national by the tribunal, though the spouse’s name is included in the draft NRC.
The court said it would examine on August 8 whether such descendants would be entitled for inclusion in the NRC. A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice R.F. Nariman during a special hearing on Tuesday rejected the plea made by Attorney-General K.K. Venugopal and Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta that there should a sample re-verification of the names included in the draft NRC, particularly those from the border region, as thousands of illegal migrants had managed to get their names included with the active collusion of local officials through bribes.
Besides inclusion of the names of several illegal migrants, those of several genuine citizens had been deleted, the Centre and Assam government had contended in two separate but identical applications which came up for hearing on Tuesday. When the Attorney-General pressed for re-verification of 20 per cent of the names, the Chief Justice pointed out that on August 28, 2018, the court had suggested 10 per cent re-verification of the names, but neither the Centre nor the Assam government had bothered to undertake any exercise for the past one year. But now, when the NRC finalisation was nearing the deadline, the government has come out with the applications for re-verification.
The court, however, agreed to extend the deadline for finalisation of the NRC to August 31 as requested by Prateek Hajela, special coordinator for NRC, in view of the recent flood situation which had affected the data updates.
The court later passed the following order: “Having regard to the grounds on which the learned coordinator, in his report dated 10.7.2019, has sought for extension of time upto 31.8.2019 for publishing the final NRC, extension prayed for should be allowed. We accordingly grant the aforesaid extension of time, namely upto 31.8.2019.”
With regard to the plea for re-verification, the court said: “We have taken note of our previous order dated 28.8.2018, whereby we had kept the issue alive. We have also read and considered the response of Mr Hajela on this aspect of the matter and specifically the stand taken by him in his report dated 18.7.2019, which is to the effect that in the course of consideration/adjudication of the claims, re-verification to the extent of 27 per cent has already been done…. We do not consider it necessary to accede to the prayers for a further sample verification,” the court said.
Referring to the claims of descendants whose parent had been declared a foreign national, the court asked the special coordinator to give maximum publicity about its proposed hearing of their claims on August 8 and no further adjournments would be allowed in the matter.
“We permit all parties before the court to have their say in the matter limited to the aforesaid two prayers. We also direct the learned coordinator to issue a public notice in this regard to enable other stakeholders, in a representative capacity, to appear before the court. The aforesaid prayers will be heard on 7.8.2019 at 3pm, when this bench will assemble again. We make it clear that in view of the exercise being time-bound, it may not be possible for the court to accept any prayer for adjournment of the matter,” Justice Gogoi said.
