Assam NRC Update: India extends deadline to June next yr

The Indian government has extended by six months to complete the exercise of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam state by June 30 next year.

In a notification, the Registrar General of India said the decision has been taken as the exercise to enumerate Indian citizens in the NRC could not be completed within the specified date of December 31 this year.

"The central government has considered it necessary and expedient in the public interest to complete the said enumeration in connection with the updation of the National Register of Citizens, 1951, by the 30th day of June 2019," said the notification issued on Thursday.

This is the sixth time that the deadline for updating the draft final NRC, which left out an estimated 4.7 million people of Assam of the list of Indian citizens, has been extended.

On December 6, 2013, the government had issued the first notification setting a deadline of three years for completion of the entire NRC process. Since then, five extensions were given by the government from time to time at regular intervals as the exercise has not yet been completed.

The draft NRC was published on July 30 and included the names of 2.9 crore people out of the total 3.29 crore applications. There has been a huge controversy over the exclusion of 40 lakh people from the draft NRC.

Many of those excluded are illiterate and poor, and some are victims of a spelling error in their names or a mistake in their age in documents offered for proof of citizenship.

Opposition parties say Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is denying citizenship to Muslims through the Assam list, and demonstrating its Hindu nationalist credentials with an eye on a general election due by May next year.

The latest extension of the deadline is expected to help at least a million people who are yet to submit the required documents in support of their efforts to include their names in the NRC.