Guwahati, Dec 10: In a major development the National Register of Citizens (NRC) authorities in an affidavit submitted at the Gauhati high court have claimed that there might be 2.77 lakh ‘undeserving’ names in the Assam NRC.

This has been stated in an affidavit filed at the HC by Assam’s NRC co-ordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma, after the HC had directed him in last October to file a comprehensive affidavit and bring on record cases where individuals who are undeserving and not legally entitled to be included, are finding ways to be included in the NRC.

“Considering the fact that 1,02,462 names deleted through ‘incidental verification’ of 27% of the draft NRC, one definitely cannot ignore the remaining 73% unverified results where there may be 2.77 lakhs undeserving names in the NRC going by the same arithmetic,” NRC authorities claimed in the affidavit , copy of which is available with Hub News.

NRC Co-ordinator has further stated in the affidavit that absence of quality check in the original inhabitant marking and verification, lack of quality check in family tree cross checking and matching are the main reasons behind such ‘wrongful inclusions’.

The HC had ordered this while hearing a case involving   declared foreigners who have claimed that they cannot be considered foreigners as their names have appeared in the Final Assam NRC  released online in 2019. The Final Assam NRC had found more than 31.1 million people eligible to be included in the registry while leaving out over 1.9 million people.

Sarma in the affidavit had categorically stated that nearly 4,800 ineligible persons got included in the the updated National Register of Citizenship (NRC) for Assam.

This week the affidavit was filed by the office of Assam state coordinator for NRC in the court of justice Manojit Bhuyan and Justice Soumitra Saikia in connection with a petition.

According to the affidavit, while verifying details of 10,199 persons on the updated list released in August last year, the NRC office detected 4,795 ineligible persons.

These persons included doubtful (D) voters, declared foreigners, persons against whom cases are pending in foreigners’ tribunals and their family members all categories which were to be excluded from the updated NRC.

Among the 10,199 persons whose details were verified, names of 5,404 persons which should have got included in the NRC didn’t make it to the list

The NRC  affidavit added that  4,795 numbers people, of which 1,032 ineligible persons belonging to Declared Foreigner (DF), Doubtful Voter (DV) , person having cases pending at Foreigners Tribunal(PFT), their descendants (DFD, DVD, PFTD)

Assam’s final NRC is yet to be notified by the Registrar general of India (RGI), thus the process is stuck in limbo.

The Supreme Court which is monitoring the NRC updation had earlier rejected Assam and Centre government’s plea for conducting 20 per cent sample re-verification.

The BJP had claimed that the Assam NRC is ‘faulty’ and had rejected it.