NRC: Officials detect forgeries in certificates
- Oct 29, 2018,
- Updated Oct 29, 2018, 1:43 AM IST
Guwahati, October 29, 2018:
National Register of Citizens (NRC) state coordinator Prateek Hajela, in his report submitted to the Supreme Court recently, highlighted about forgeries in the issuance of refugee registration certificates and citizenship certificates.
The forgeries, it was learnt, turned out to be a major hurdle in the verification of documents submitted by lakhs of applicants for inclusion their names in the NRC. According to reports, only a small number of these documents could be verified by the NRC officials.
Hajela, in the report, said the certificates were issued to the migrants from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by some non-government organizations and many of these no longer exist. Some organisations include Refugee Relief Committee, All Assam Refugee Association, Assam Refugee, East Pakistan Refugee Relief and many other such organisations. He claimed that the certificates issued by private organisations could not be accepted as the authenticity of the organisations could not be examined while some no longer exist.
The report added that some applicants also submitted relief eligibility certificates which bear the name of Ministry of Rehabilitation but among these most do not have any official government signature.
Many forged certificates were also detected by the authorities but a major number of the documents could not be verified as the concerned government offices did not have proper records.
The report stated that 1,43,714 refugee registration certificates were submitted but only 10,585 of those could be verified and found to be authentic while 112 were found to be forged.
More than 50,000 could not be verified as there were no records available for back-end verification.
About 66,559 such citizenship certificates were submitted by the applicants but among these about 11,000 could be verified while 376 were found to be forged. Backend verification of more than 25,000 documents was not possible because of lack of records and more than 19,000 were illegible.