While US President-elect Trump is planning to deport almost 3 million undocumented immigrants, Assam has been working on a similar program called 'Detect-Delete-Deport' for over 2 years.

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20 million illegal immigrants from Bangladesh may be deported from Assam after they are tagged on a registry.

Illegal Immigrants In Assam Can Buy An Indian Citizenship For As Little As Rs 10,000!

"The Hindu rate of population growth is declining. But the Muslim rate is rising. Most of the Muslims here are from Bangladesh. If this continues, the Assamese Hindus will become a minority soon; we will lose our language, our culture, our identity," Himanta Biswa Sarma, finance minister in the Assam government told the Washington Post.

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Apart from preserving cultural identity, it is the most immediate fears of terrorist groups from Bangladesh, a nation known to shelter radical Islamism.

"Our detect-delete-deport campaign is even more important because now Islamic extremist groups from Bangladesh are also sending their people to India along with the immigrants on this route," said Samujjal Bhattacharya, a longtime activist.

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It is hard, however, to track the Bangladeshi population here. Many have managed to get local identification papers via forged documents. To counter this, officials are looking not only into individuals but also their family trees, in a $138 million project.

An ecosystem of middlemen, facilitators and corrupt officers help Bangladeshi easily cross the border

Illegal immigration is by far the biggest issue in the Assam primarily because sneaking into Assam from Bangladesh is fairly easy. The size of the Brahmaputra varies through the year, making it almost impossible to fence the border. Thus, a large part of the district is unfenced, making it easy for illegal migrants along the border to sneak into Assam.

In February, BJP national president Amit Shah had said that the party's victory would stop illegal immigrants' entry into the state. The party would go on to win the state.

"The Narendra Modi government has done an agreement with Bangladesh and soon the borders with Bangladesh will be fenced. Already this government has started identifying illegal immigrants; around 60,000 such illegal immigrants are identified," he had said.

In June this year, The National Register of Citizens (NRC) investigation has found that there are 27,000 illegal immigrants in Dhubri (one of the district's in Assam) alone.

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As per sources, it was found out that it was ridiculously easy for a foreign national to acquire Indian citizenship by submitting fake documents or by paying as little as Rs. 10,000 to acquire one. Prabajan Virodhi Manch (PVM), an NGO against the infiltration of migrants, is of the view that the Assam government was not doing its bit to tackle the illegal migration issue from Bangladesh. The PVM has urged the Centre to intervene while alleging that documents are fraudulently being acquired by immigrants in Assam for including their names in the updated National Register of Citizenship (NRC).

"There is large-scale fabrication of documents, birth certificates, identity proof, land documents etc which needs to be uncovered by a central agency as such papers will be the basis for asking citizenship," PVM Convenor Upamanyu Hazarika told reporters