Assam Govt Decided To Discontinue Services Of 200 Additional Members Of Foreigners' Tribunals

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• Oct 16, 2022 | Dhupali Das

The additional FT members were appointed in 2019 to settle the claims of people who were...

Digital Desk: With the Registrar General of India yet to notify Assam's updated National Register of Citizens (NRC), the state government has opted to terminate the services of 200 additional members of Foreigner Tribunals appointed to resolve claims of people left out of the NRC.

An order issued by the Assam home department on Friday stated, "Utilization of services of the members along with 2,000 posts of ministerial staff in 200 appellate Foreigner Tribunals will be considered as and when the NRC gets notified." It stated that the services of members and ministerial staff would be discontinued on October 23. The order said that this was following the approval from the Ministry of Home Affairs on Thursday.

The additional FT members were appointed in 2019 to settle the claims of people who were left out of the updated NRC. Currently, Assam has 100 FTs.

More than 19.06 lakh people, who were to have had the opportunity to move the FTs to verify their Indian citizenship with documentation, were excluded from the amended NRC (pre-1971). However, the exercise is now uncertain because it took longer than expected to send "rejection slips" to each of the excluded people. The NRC exercise, which cost more than Rs 1,600 crore, was halted primarily because the BJP-led government refused to accept the "final list" and asked the Supreme Court to re-verify it due to "wide-scale flaws" that allowed "people of dubious nationality" to be counted as Indians.

The All Assam Students Union is one of the organizations that has asked for a second look at the NRC process. The NRC in Assam was updated with March 24, 1971, as the cut-off date in order to segregate "foreigners" from Indian citizens to solve the state's long problem of "illegal migration" from neighbouring Bangladesh.