State government officials reckon it is a “unique problem” and attribute it to red tape and a lack of clarity on the NRC exercise itself.
For 18 months now, Bhanu Upadhyay, a postdoctoral fellow at IIT Bombay, has been running around for an Aadhaar card. After many calls to toll-free numbers, e-mails, and visits to application centres, the Aadhaar application of the 33-year-old Nepali-origin resident of Assam is “still under process”.
Upadhyay, who hails from Abhongpathar, a remote village in Golaghat district, managed to work around the need for the unique identification number. “But it’s giving me sleepless nights now since I will be applying for jobs at central institutions which won’t accept my application without Aadhaar,” he says.
Upadhyay is not alone. Around eight lakh people who provided their biometrics, and also made it to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) published on August 31, 2019, are struggling to get Aadhaar, and worry about benefits linked to it. In all, 27 lakh people had registered their biometrics, but 19 lakh of these did not find their names in the NRC.
State government officials reckon it is a “unique problem” and attribute it to red tape and a lack of clarity on the NRC exercise itself. The state has highlighted the issue by writing to the Registrar General of India, but no action has been forthcoming so far.
At the heart of the problem is a November 2018 Supreme Court-approved Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Under the SOP, those left out of the draft NRC list published on July 31, 2018, had to mandatorily submit their biometrics during the hearings of ‘claims’ (to include themselves in the NRC) and ‘objections’ (to object to someone else’s inclusion) process. These hearings were conducted in the run-up to the publication of the complete list on August 31, 2019.
This article was originally published in The Indian Express in August 2021. Full article here.