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Numerous Hindi-speaking people in Assam have alleged that they were left out of the first draft of the state's National Register of Citizens as their documents of proof were written in the Devanagari script and the Urdu dialect.
The officers who were responsible for scanning the documents of proof claimed they were difficult to understand due to the script in which they were written, according to a report by The Economic Times.
Also read: 40 lakh people left off final NRC draft list by Assam government: What now?
The paper quoted Mohan Kumar Shah, President of All Asom Bhojpuri Parishad for Tinsukia district, as saying that he had furnished a legal document that was issued to his family in Muzaffarpur, Bihar.
Shah claimed that these documents proved that he hailed from another part of the country. He said that since the document was issued in 1951, it was written in the Urdu dialect using the Devanagari script.
Close to a hundred people who had faced a similar problem had gathered in Tingrai, a tea producing area in Tinsukia, to discuss the issue on August 9.
Shah said that several families from Bihar, Odisha and Jharkhand were brought to the state by the British before 1950 to work on tea plantations.
The group concluded that they would intimate Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and put a petition before Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh about the matter.
Initiated in 1951 along with the first census, the NRC is meant to be a record of all legal citizens of a state. It takes into consideration things like property owned and houses in every village and the number of people residing in them.
The logic of updating the NRC involves enlisting all those listed in electoral rolls up to 1971, the 1951 list or any of the prescribed documents. Those who are not enlisted, therefore, are automatically deemed as "illegal citizens" which has caused a panic in the state.
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