GUWAHATI: Four Assam districts have more Aadhar card holders than their projected population, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Saturday.
The four districts are Barpeta, Dhubri (both in lower Assam), Morigaon and Nagaon (both in central Assam). The Muslims are a majority in these districts. Dhubri shares a border with Bangladesh.
“We found that 103.74 per cent of people were issued Aadhar cards in Barpeta, 103.48 per cent in Dhubri, 101.74 per cent in Morigaon and 100.68 per cent in Nagaon. Definitely, suspected immigrants managed to take Aadhar,” Sarma said.
He said the state government would issue fresh guidelines within the next 10 days whereby people applying for Aadhar cards from October 1 would be required to share their National Register of Citizens (NRC) application receipt number.
“You have to be an NRC applicant whether or not you made it to NRC. You will not get Aadhar in Assam if you have not applied for NRC. We will minutely examine everything and make the process tough and stringent,” Sarma said.
He added that the tea garden community would be excluded from this rule as the Aadhar process could not be implemented properly in the tea gardens due to various reasons.
“The government of India has given us a power that if the state government wants, it can give Aadhar. We will utilise this power in such a way that illegal immigrants cannot take Aadhar,” the Assam chief minister said.
He believed that this effort would help prevent the illegal migration of people from Bangladesh.
He said over 9.35 lakh people, whose biometrics were blocked by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2019 during the updation of NRC, would get their Aadhar cards within September. The central government cleared it recently.
“UIDAI will come up with the protocol in the next one to two days,” he said. Meanwhile, Sarma said the state government would intensify efforts to detect illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
“The detection of illegal immigrants entering Assam through its international borders has long been a critical responsibility of Assam’s border police. However, we arrested 20 to 30 immigrants in the last two months and pushed them back. This proves that immigrants are coming, even if their number is small. So, we will intensify the drive to detect illegal immigrants,” Sarma said.