Guwahati: The Government of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar  is sitting upon some 47,000 documents that will help ascertain whether the ‘Biharis’ residing in Assam are really from Bihar or actually fake illegal immigrants.

Even ‘slow states’ like UP and Bengal have verified over a thousand documents, while Tripura has verified 39,249.

Bihar hasn’t verified a single document and the Supreme Court isn’t pleased!

Bihar is yet to verify a single of the over 47,000 documents sent by Assam despite a Supreme Court directive issued three months ago to all states to expedite the verification process for updating the National Register of Citizens in Assam. (Jan 31)

“There is zero response from Bihar where a total of 47,423 documents were sent for verification,” an official source said.

He said a Supreme Court bench of Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman had, on October 26, 2016, directed the chief secretaries of 28 states, including Bihar, to immediately respond in respect of the documents pertaining to verification for NRC update in Assam. The Registrar-General of India had also asked all the states to cooperate in the NRC update.

The Supreme Court had said, “We would expect the chief secretaries of the states to act in the matter with utmost dispatch and we also make it clear that in the event the response of the chief secretaries in terms of the order is not satisfactory or adequate, orders may be issued for their personal appearance before this court.” The top court passed the order after the state coordinator for NRC, Prateek Hajela, submitted a report about the progress in NRC update and the difficulties faced in the course of the ongoing exercise. Hajela stated in the report that the NRC authorities had not received any response to a large number of documents sent for verification to other states.

Of the 3.55 lakh documents sent to the states for verification, replies have been received to only 64,452 documents, which shows that inter-state verification of documents has become a major concern in NRC update.

“The response from Bengal has been poor too. We have so far got back only 1,509 of the 92,083 documents sent to different authorities under the Bengal government,” the source said.

“From Uttar Pradesh, we have received 1,682 of the 12,854 documents sent. Tripura has responded comparatively well as it had verified 20,864 of the 39,249 documents sent to it,” he added.

The process of updating the original NRC, prepared in 1951, had started in Assam on February 27, 2015, for detection and deportation of illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Of the 5.94 crore documents taken up for office verification, 5.46 crore documents (91.89 per cent) have already been verified with the issuing authorities by comparing with the originals.

During verification, it was found that forged documents had been submitted by some applications to enter their names in the NRC and 166 FIRs have been registered in connection with forgeries.

  Assam, Bihar, Northeast