The NRC authorities have said that the process of issuing rejection certificates to the 19 lakh people whose names were excluded from the final NRC list will begin after one month.

“Some work like scanning of documents remains to be done. We hope to complete the remaining work within one month, after which we will start issuing the rejection certificates,” said NRC Assam state coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma.

Last week, the districts where NRC-related work is pending had asked teachers who were released from NRC duty earlier to rejoin immediately to complete the work.

Teachers constituted a large part of the 55,000 government employees that the NRC authorities had earlier engaged for NRC update work. After publication of the final NRC, they were released from duty. “Only those districts are asking for service of the teachers where work is still pending,” Sarma said.

Rejection certificates will be required for the 19 lakh people who were excluded from the final NRC published in August last year to approach foreigners tribunal (FTs) to establish their citizenship. The Assam government is ready with 200 new FTs, in addition to the existing 100 FTs, to meet the rush following issuance of rejection certificates.

Sources in Dispur said they were waiting for the NRC authorities to issue the rejection certificates to start functioning of the tribunals. The government has already appointed the members (judges) of the 200 new tribunals and selected other employees after conducting an examination.

“Besides these 300 FTs, the government is ready to start another 200 FTs. It had decided to start the new 200 FTs in December last year. However, the entire process hit a logjam when Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed in Parliament and subsequent protests took place in the state,” the source said.

Besides government employees, the NRC authorities had engaged 828 employees on contract. These employees have been demanding government appointments, saying that they have worked dedicatedly for NRC update and gathered enough experience to be appointed in government service. “We have come to know that our jobs will remain till March 31. We have been working 16 to 18 hours every day for NRC update. We were engaged in administrative work. We have submitted a memorandum recently to chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal with the demand to appoint us in other departments,” said a member of NRC Employees Association, which has the 828 contractual employees as its members.

He said Sonowal was likely to meet the employees soon to discuss their issues.