oppn parties Flawed Process Must Be Rectified Before Conducting NRC All Across India

News Snippets

  • SP drops two candidates owing allegiance to Azam Khan from Rampur and Moradabad
  • In Assam, a controversy erupted after a picture of UPPL leader Benjamin Basumatary, lying on a stack of Rs 500 notes circulated on social media. UPPL is an ally of the BJP
  • AAP's Jalandhar-West MP Sushil Kumar Rinku joins the BJP. He was the only AAP Lok Sabha MP
  • Supreme Court dismisses Centre's plea to review its 2023 verdict in the PMLA case
  • Close save for passengers as they remain unhurt after the wings of two planes graze at Kolkata airport. Pilots derostered and inquiry ordered by DGCA
  • Bengal BJP leader Dilip Ghosh gets notice from the EC as well as the BJP for making ugly remarks about Mamata Banerjee's parentage
  • Sadanand Vasanth Date, who faught terrorists in the 26/11 attack and was awarded the Preisent's Police medal, has been appointed the head of the NIA
  • Centre will borrow Rs 7.5L cr in the first six months of FY25, nearly 50% of the target for the full year
  • 25 stocks, including SBI, will see same day trade settlements from today in the world's fastest settlement mode in both BSE and NSE
  • Stocks recover smartly on Wednesday: Sensex rises 526 points to 72996 and Nifty 118 points to 22123
  • Tennis: Rohan Bopanna-Matthew Ebden reached the semifinals of the Miami Open
  • IPL: records tumble as SRH beat MI in a high-scoring match. SRH score 277/3 with 18 sixes and Mumbai score 246 with 20 sixes to fall short by 31 runs. Atotal of 38 sixes, highest in an IPL match were hit and both teams combined to score 523 runs, the highest aggregate in an IPL match
  • Amul will launch fresh milk in the US
  • IPL: RCB beat Punjab by 4 wickets as Kohli and Karthik shine with the bat
  • India strongly objected to German foreign office remarks over the arrest of delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, called it "biased assumptions"
Delhi Lt Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena says government cannot be run from jail, hints at President's Rule in the capital ////// In a dangerous incident, the wings of two planes grazed while taxiing on the runway at Kolkata airport, all passengers were safe but DGCA ordered an inquiry and the pilots were derostered
oppn parties
Flawed Process Must Be Rectified Before Conducting NRC All Across India

By Sunil Garodia

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.

The NRC exercise in its present form has failed to achieve its stated purpose of detecting infiltrators. The Assam experience was a flop and many genuine inhabitants of the state were left out while not many Bangladeshis were detected. No party in the state, including the ruling BJP, was satisfied with the outcome of the prolonged and costly exercise.

Yet, Home Minister Amit Shah has stated in Parliament that it will be undertaken on a pan-India basis. Is there any logic in spending time, effort and money in conducting this flawed exercise throughout the country? Shah's repeated insistence on taking the NRC to other states has created a fear psychosis amongst citizens, especially in West Bengal.

State chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her party, the TMC, have said that they will oppose any move to conduct the NRC exercise in the state. The state has seen a mad scramble amongst citizens to acquire the documents that were part of the exercise in Assam, despite Banerjee's assurance that she will not allow it in the state.

Although it is no one's case that illegal infiltrators from Bangladesh be allowed to live in India, the NRC, as conducted in Assam, has failed to detect them. Then what is the point in conducting the exercise elsewhere? Instead, the government should learn from the Assam experience and find out the reasons why it failed. Since it was a document-based exercise, the government has to take a fresh look at the whole process.

One feels that the government must suspend the NRC exercise until the results of the next Census (slated to be conducted in 2021) are out. Till then, it must constitute an expert committee to study the results of the NRC in Assam, find out what went wrong and suggest how to make it better. If the 2021 Census also throws up demographic changes in districts bordering Bangladesh and elsewhere in the country, the government can conduct a revamped and improved NRC across India. But rushing forward with the flawed exercise now would be a mistake.