NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Centre and the Assam government to provide details of people suspected to be foreigners and lodged in six detention centres in the state pending their trial and identification by Foreigners Tribunals.A PIL filed by activist Harsh Mander alleged that these six detention centres were packed with nearly 1,000 people suspected to be foreigners or identified as such by the tribunals.“There are many who have already served the imprisonment awarded by the courts and yet they are not released as the governments claim that the neighbouring country was not accepting them. If their country is not accepting them, they should be released. Some condition to stop them from fleeing could be imposed,” advocate Prashant Bhushan, who appeared for Mander, told a bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna.The bench asked the authorities to file an affidavit in three weeks giving details of “total number of detention centres and the inmates therein, period for which such inmates have been lodged, whether all inmates in detention centres have been declared foreigners or such inmates include persons whose references are pending before Foreigners Tribunals, number of persons declared as foreigners by tribunals in the last decade with year-wise break-up, of those declared as foreigners, whether attempts were made to repatriate how many and the result thereof”. The bench posted the matter for further hearing on February 19.There are 100 foreigners tribunals functioning in Assam. On September 24 last year, the BJP government in Assam had informed the assembly that “according to data received from border wing of Assam Police, foreigners tribunals have declared 91,609 people as foreigners till March 31, 2018. While 128 of them have been deported till August 31, 2018, four of them have been expelled during this period. A total of 1,037 declared foreigners are kept under detention in detention camps at Goalpara, Kokrajhar, Silchar Jorhat and Tezpur.”The draft NRC published in August last year included names of 2,89,836,77 people of the state but excluded the names of 40,07,707 people citing ‘discrepancies’.