Amit Shah chairs meeting on NRC, people excluded to be given 'full opportunity' to appeal

New Delhi: Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday held a review meeting of the issues related to final publication of National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam.

The review meeting was attended by Assam Chief Minister Sarbanadn Sonowal, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba and other senior officials from Assam and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

In the meeting, chaired by Shah, it was decided that those excluded from the final list will be given full opportunity to appeal against their non-inclusion.

Everyone whose name does not figure in final NRC can represent case in front of Foreigner Tribunals, according to an ANI report.

The final NRC list is scheduled to be published on August 31. The earlier day of publication of the list of July 31. The Supreme Court, however, granted a one-month extension to the State NRC coordinator for publishing the final NRC list.

The court also rejected a demand by the Centre and the Assam government to conduct a sample re-verification of the draft NRC list on an apprehension that certain illegal migrants could have made their way into the list by bribing local officials involved with the NRC work.

They submitted before the apex court that their concerns were genuine and borne out of data which showed that while in the entire state, the exclusion was 12.7%, in the border areas, it was just 7.7%, giving rise to apprehensions that some scurrilous activity could have occurred in the rollout of NRC.

The bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice RF Nariman were of the firm view that such a request should not be granted. Giving reasons, it said that NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela, in his July 18 report, has categorically stated that in the fresh rounds of claim verification of persons, almost 27% of the draft NRC list in each district stood re-verified.

The court pointedly asked Hajela what he felt about the Centre's demand, to which he replied that such an exercise was not necessary. 

(With inputs from DNA)