Rais Shaikh, a Samajwadi corporator, has raised concerns over the inadequate staffing at municipal offices to help process documents of people panicking over National Register of Citizens (NRC), National Population Register (NPR) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). He says people have been thronging municipal offices to either get their birth certificates or have corrections made in their documents.
According to Indian Express, he raised this concern at the Standing Committee meeting on Thursday saying, “For obtaining a birth certificate people have to wait for months… for simple corrections in names they made to run from pillar to post. The BMC should make a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) on how to get a certificate or how to make corrections in names. The shortage of staff in civic wards’ health department should also be first. At least, the civic body should issue a seven-day deadline to issue documents.”
NCP group leader Rakhi Jadhav and Congrees corporator from Bandra Asif Zakeria also corroborated Shaikh’s claims about NRC related panic among people, chief being absence of key documents or minor corrections required in them,
This fear emanates from the plight of people in Assam who were declared foreigner and thrown in detention camps due to minor discrepancies in the spelling of their names or other data in their documents. CJP has worked closely with many such people and helped to bring to light their plight. Saken Ali was forced to spend five years in a detention camp because of a minor discrepancy in how his name was spelt in two different documents. A pregnant Rashminara Begum was dragged away to a detention camp because of another such discrepancy in her date of birth. Even the family of the first Deputy Speaker of Assam’s Legislative Assembly was not spared… they were dubbed ‘foreigners’!
But now that the specter of a nationwide exercise along the lines of Assam’s NRC appears likely, people across India, even in an urban metropolis like Mumbai are beginning to fear for their freedom and future.
Related:
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