The government employees engaged at the National Register of Citizens (NRC) hearing centre in Rajdhani ME School here on Monday were busy preparing all the documents they had to submit to the NRC head office.

As the day of publication date of the final NRC approaches, pressure is mounting on them to meet the August 31 deadline.

Very often they are having to stay back in office till midnight, verifying documents and preparing reports on people who had filed claims or individuals against whom objections were filed and most recently, those who had to face the “quality check” round.

The employees were a little relaxed as they could send their reports to the NRC office on Monday morning. Based on those reports, which had been scrutinised twice, the NRC authorities will prepare and publish the final NRC.

The final NRC, a list of genuine Indians living in Assam, will be an important document to help resolve the foreigners problem of the state.

An employee at the hearing centre said: “We had to work hard, sometimes throughout the night. The re-verification process did not end with us. Our reports, along with the documents, were scrutinised by a circle officer and then by an additional deputy commissioner. Based on that, a combined report was prepared.”

Throughout the process the employees had to be extremely careful. If something goes wrong, a genuine Indian citizen may end up fighting legal battles to establish himself as an Indian citizen. Any mistake could turn an illegal migrant into an Indian citizen.

The employees of the NRC Seva Kendras were to some extent stress-free on Monday as the task of scrutinising documents had now been handed over to the hearing centres.

“We have to be always available in our office. You do not know what order comes when. We should always be alert,” said an official of Dispur 28 NRC Seva Kendra (NSK) in Hatigaon here.

The busy time at the NSKs aimed to ensure that each of the 1.02 lakh people, excluded from the final NRC, received notices conveying the reasons of their exclusion.

However, employees of neither the hearing centres nor the NSKs nor the deputy commissioners have received any instruction from the NRC head office as of now regarding the day of publication of the final NRC.

When contacted, a deputy commissioner said they were yet to receive any communication regarding August 31. However, the NRC state coordinator, Prateek Hajela, had met the deputy commissioner here a few days back.

Inclusion plea

The All Assam Bengali Hindu Association (AABHA), on Monday, demanded that a representative from the Bengali Hindu community be included in the committee appointed by the Centre in connection with the implementation of Clause 6 of the Assam Accord.

The Centre has appointed a 13-member committee to suggest measures to implement Clause 6, aimed at providing constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people.

At a news conference in Silchar on Monday evening, the association’s president Basudeb Sharma said the committee had used the word “indigenous” repeatedly.

He questioned what the committee tried to meanand said all those who are living in Assam for decades are the genuine citizens of the state.