Ex-NRC chief flags foreigners in Assam voter list, recommends ‘family tree’ audit

Guwahati July 20:  As a large number of foreigners managed to include their names in the electoral rolls of Assam, the Election Commission of India (ECI) can examine the ‘family trees’ of every individual of the State to prepare a correct voter list, suggested former State NRC coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma.

During the preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), it was found that a large number of people managed to enrol their names in the NRC with fake documents and in fact, it was also found that some people had multiple voter identity cards under different names.

In a letter to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Dev Sarma expressed his gratitude to the Election Commission for taking up an intensive revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar following large scale detection of foreigners’ names in the voter list. But the situation of Assam is far worse than Bihar or any other state of India so far as the electoral rolls is concerned, he said.

Sarma said the verification process of NRC was divided into two major parts – verification of documents and establishment of linkage. Verification of documents submitted by the applicants was done by sending the scanned copy of such documents to the issuing authority to ascertain the genuineness of these papers, which is called back-end verification.

The back-end verification was almost a foolproof method to detect submission of false or forged documents. But though the genuineness of a document could be established through the back-end verification, there is always a chance that the genuine document might be fraudulently used to claim one’s nationality.

While office verification was being done, it was noticed that all the fraudulently submitted documents could not be detected through office and field verification as some imposters tried to establish linkages with genuine citizens through fraudulently acquired (but officially genuine) documents.

The ‘Family Tree Matching’ was introduced as a remedy to this. In the Family Tree Matching process, all the offsprings of a ‘Legacy Person’ from whom lineage is claimed were asked to submit their family details, which were then compared and matched through a software with the other family trees submitted by descendants of the same legacy person.

Thus, there appears a mismatch as and when there is an attempt to claim false lineage, since elaborate checking can easily expose the names of those persons who are not biological descendants of the legacy person. The mechanism was designed to be such that the family tree of the genuine offspring matches with each other.

And the family tree of the imposters, who attempt to assume discordance through pre-1971 legacy documents as their ancestors, does not match with that of the genuine offspring.

Sarma pointed out that the procedure of verification adopted in NRC may also be tried for creating a flawless voter list for Assam. It may be mentioned that the family trees of almost all the persons of Assam are available with the NRC authority and the ECI may get hold of it with the permission of the Supreme Court of India as the update of NRC was done under direct monitoring of the apex court. Especially without the family tree verification, any type of authentication is likely to fail under the present context.