After Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma cleared the air around the National Register of Citizens saying that the government wants re-examination of a certain percentage of names, the Assam coordinator of the NRC in Assam, Hitesh Sarma, filed an appeal in the Supreme Court urging it to order a complete, comprehensive and time-bound re-verification of the NRC published in 2019. Chief Minister Sarma had said that the NDA government wants a re-examination of 20 per cent of names included in border districts and 10 per cent of names in other districts.
The BJP had in its manifesto promised to initiate the process of the correction and reconciliation of entries under the Supreme Court-mandated National Register of Citizens in a structured manner to protect genuine Indian citizens.
Hitesh Sarma has claimed in his application that the NRC list has anomalies that had led to ineligible persons being included in the list.
He said that several serious, fundamental and substantial errors have crept into the process of updating NRC in Assam. He submitted that the supplementary list for inclusion and exclusion of NRC that has been published is not free from errors.
Sarma also appealed to the apex court that the re-verification is done under the supervision of a monitoring committee which should have a district judge, district magistrate and police chief as its members.
The NRC published in 2019 had excluded around 19 lakh people from around 3.3 crore applicants. Sarma has maintained that the NRC published in 2019 was not final.
