GUWAHATI: Over a lakh men and women who had been declared foreigners by tribunals or marked ‘doubtful’ voters had managed to forge their way into the first NRC draft published on December 31. Forging PAN cards, voter identity cards, children’s birth certificates and even stealing legacy data codes of others were different modes used by these people for their inclusion in the draft. All these names were deleted in the updated draft released on July 30.

Over 48,000 married women included in the earlier draft had submitted forged panchayat certificates as linkage documents. The forgery was discovered during the re-verification ahead of the updated NRC draft.

Hemen Das, deputy commissioner of Morigaon district , said, “The most common case of forgery was fake birth certificates all of which had the name of one public health centre. When we sent them for verification, the hospital authorities informed us that these documents were never issued by them. We even found forged voter identity cards and some of them were found to have intentionally used wrong legacy data. We are still looking to identify these people and legal action will be taken against them after the NRC process is over.”

But the biggest fraud that these people resorted to was stealing legacy data of others to link themselves to randomly selected families. They too made it to the first draft, but during the course of the family tree investigation, 65,694 of these applicants were detected and their names deleted. Since the legacy data of the 1951 NRC and the voters lists up to 1971 were made accessible online, many unscrupulous people used these details to forge their citizenship claims.

NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela has already said, “We have already put a disclaimer on our website that as and when we find any name that has been wrongly included, we will delete it. The scrutiny process is still on.”

