I do see a lot of fear and apprehension over the NRC which is anticipated post the CAA . So I just went through the CAA-NRC FAQ issued by the Govt of India .
On the question to what details would be required it states the following
“It will be sufficient to give the details of date and place of birth and if you do not have the details ,you have to provide the same details about your parents”
Secondly about the documents it says the following
“Citizenship can be proved by submitting any documents related to the date of birth and place of birth. However, a decision is yet to be taken on such acceptable documents. It is likely to include voter card, passport, Aadhaar, license, insurance paper, land or house papers or other similar documents issued by government”
Now I did go through the UIDAI website to check the Aadhaar coverage and found it to be close to 90%. The outliers primarily being the North East, especially Assam owing to the fact that the Aadhaar enrollment started pretty late there.
The enrollment has not reached a 100% primarily because a lot of under 18 citizens have not registered .
I just took Aadhaar as a benchmark here but as you can see , there are a host of other govt documents that would also suffice . Most importantly the NRC is not yet drafted so it’s too early to comment on what additional provisions it would provide for the proofs.
So purely on the basis of Aadhaar we should be able to cover more than 90% of the citizens (considering parents would be able to cover juveniles). If we include the additional documents deemed valid , this number should go up even more.
A lot of the fear is due to the fact that the Assam NRC didn’t go down too well, but it would not be appropriate to mix this with a national NRC due to the Aadhaar disparity. However I would still want to ensure that the govt doesn’t miss out on even 1% of the citizens due to lack of documents coz with a population like ours that number would still be 1.3 crores.
P.S : The purpose of this post is not to support or justify the NRC but to quell any fears.
