North East Rising

1. Rina Ghose, a Chirang resident, supplements ₹1,000 midday meal income with odd jobs.
2. Lacks government benefits like Orunodoi, free rice, and PMAY housing.
3. Struggles to make ends meet despite efforts to increase income through community work.

Guwahati, May 06: Rina Ghose, a resident of Chirang district in Lower Assam, feels distressed as she takes up various odd jobs within her community to supplement her monthly income of ₹1,000 earned as a midday meal worker.

She does not get government benefits like Orunodoi (the Assam government’s monthly allowance of ₹ 1,250 for poor women), free rice or PMAY housing.

Almost 90 kilometers away in Rangia, Kamrup, journalist-activist Samsul Haque (37) had to buy a car in the name of a relative because he could not manage his bank account. He also cannot renew his driver’s license or claim 5 kilograms of free rice, even though she has a ration card.

More than 2,800 kilometers away in Bengaluru, 27-year-old tobacco factory worker Fazrul Hoque from Assam’s Dhubri district sees his salary handed over to a colleague – who then pays him after a “small cut”– because he doesn’t have a bank account.

He cannot apply for a ration card either. The source of the trio’s pain is the absence of an Aadhaar card. Their card applications were rejected as their biometrics were locked during the National Register of Citizens (NRC) updating exercise in Assam.

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However, all three are in the final NRC. More than 27,000 people in 35 districts of Assam are without an Aadhaar card.

They were among the more than 40 million who were left out of the NRC draft in 2018, whose biometrics were later collected by the country’s General Administration Department for inclusion in the citizenship register in the promotion and objection phase.

Among these 27 lakh people are 7.94 lakh who qualified in the last NRC – released in August 2019 – and 19 lakh who did not qualify.

Biometrics was blocked because the then NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela submitted a Standard Operating Procedure (SoP) to the Supreme Court in 2018 that Aadhaar cards should not be issued to deportable persons.

The Supreme Court accepted the suit and the bar was not raised, the former official said.
Those excluded from the final NRC must prove their citizenship in alien courts.

However, the process stalled as the ruling BJP and other organizations alleged that the final list contained errors and demanded a flawless NRC. The 27 million affected people belong to all ethnic and religious communities.

Rina constituencies in Kokrajhar and Fazrul Dhubri will vote on May 7, while Samsul constituencies in Darrang-Udalgur will go to polls on April 26.

But the Aadhaar issue was not covered in the inquiry here, people say. Sufferers face several problems: they cannot open a bank account, file income tax returns, or receive government aid or scholarships. They face obstacles to joining civil service.

Several organizations — including Guwahati-based NGO Assam Public Works, which was the original petitioner in the Supreme Court that led to the state’s 1951 NRC being updated — filed petitions in the Supreme Court seeking to open up the biometric data.

In February this year, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the assembly that his government was approaching the Center to provide relief to the victims.

27,000 million are still pending. Dhubri resident Habibul Bepari, a member of Citizens for Justice and Peace, said most of the victims are from marginalized groups that include different religions.

“There is a lot of government work that cannot be done today without Aadhaar. The government and political parties should have taken it seriously and helped the affected,” Habibul said.