Assam government terminates services of 200 additional Foreigners’ Tribunals

The Assam government has decided not to extend the terms of members nominated to represent additional 200 appellate Foreigners' Tribunals (FT), which were established primarily to deal with disputes involving the National Register of Citizens.

Further, the utilisation of services of the members along with the 2000 posts of Ministerial Staff in 200 Appellate Foreigners Tribunals will be considered as and when the NRC gets notified, a notification stated.

Notably in Assam from the initial stage when NRC was implemented, around 100 Foreigners Tribunals were been associated with the disputes involving the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

It is to be mentioned here that in 2019 after the intervention of the Supreme Court of India with regard to the publication of the NRC final draft, a chaotic situation arose where lakhs of people's name was excluded from the NRC draft list.

Further in order to facilitate the people excluded from the list for re-claiming after which if any person/citizen fails to prove their citizenship will be provided with a "Rejection Slip".

With this now the next option left with the people who were rejected was to apply for the Foreigners' Tribunals (FT) wherein, the tribunals after thorough investigation will give the judgement/status of their citizenship.

Following the massive number of rejection slips in hand, which could have gone upto 40-50 lakhs people, only 100 Foreigners' Tribunals (FT) could not take up the job diligently nor complete the work.

Thus the government of Assam along with the Centre's accord granted the approval of setting up of additional 200 Foreigners' Tribunals (FT) in order to facilitate the citizens.

Further, the High Court after setting up an exam wherein only advocates were taken into consideration selected 200 people for the job on a contractual basis and offices were been set by the Home Department to initiate the process.

However, with this one must recollect that in Assam only the NRC draft was published, the final NRC never came to see the light, following which there was no question of a "Rejection Slip" to be issued.

And the additional 200 Foreigners' Tribunals (FT) were only created to facilitate the citizens with the "Rejection Slip" which never happened since 2019.

Further, as only around 1 lakh pending cases were left based on the Assam police inputs, were given to the FTs but were not handed properly due to infrastructure as well as manpower, as the people were not recruited as NRC final never happened.

With this the Assam government and the government of India after a discussion highlighted the issues and also remarked on the FTs' work, it was decided that all the people who were recruited on a contractual basis to be forfeited, however, as when NRC will be notified their services will be reconsidered.