Assam Nrc: Sc Extends Deadline For Filing Claims And Objections To December 31 indianexpress.com

The Supreme Court on Wednesday extended the last date of filing claims and objections on the inclusion of names in the draft National Register of Citizen (NRC) to December 31. Earlier, the apex court had fixed December 15 as the last date to submit claims and objections for the 40 lakh applicants who were left out of the final NRC draft.

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Till now, only around 14.8 lakh claims have been filed — indicating the difficulty being faced by the excluded in getting their names in the NRC list. “Out of 40 lakh people who were left out of the final draft NRC, 14.8 lakh people have filed claims,” NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela told the Supreme Court. The date for commencement of verification has also been postponed to February 15 from February 1.

Under ‘Objections’, people could raise objections to the inclusion of a name in the NRC. What has compounded matters is that the Standard Operations Procedure of the Claims and Objections round accepted by the court says that a person cannot use a different legacy person than the one used during the initial application.

READ: Assam NRC: Why so few people have filed claims
In a press statement last month, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal admitted that the number of Claims filed over the NRC were so far “very dissatisfactory”. Apart from “freezing of legacy person”, setting the cut-off date for documents that could be used by a person to establish the link to his ancestors as August 31, 2015, is also hindering filing of claims.

The filing of objections too, at 200-odd, has been “negligible”. In a recent press statement, Upamanyu Hazarika, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court, said the primary reason was that an objector needs to know the Application Receipt Number (ARN) of the person whose inclusion he wants to object to. The ARN is a 21-digit number an applicant receives on applying for inclusion in the NRC. “The procedure for filing an Objection has rendered the entire process a nullity,” Hazarika said.