Assam will hold Assembly Elections in the next three months and the Supreme Court has directed the government to prepare a “new and correct” NRC before the polling to ensure that no irregular citizen can participate in the elections.

According to Prateek Hajela, Assam State Coordinator for updating the NRC, a substantial number of forged or fake documents have been detected so far.

“This proves that undeserving and unscrupulous persons are using fraudulent means to get their names included in the NRC,” he said.

However, the state coordinator asserted that all possible measures were being taken to sieve out “undeserving persons” during the verification process so that a correct NRC could be prepared.

Interestingly enough, most of the fake documents were submitted in the lower Assam districts, Hajela said.

“In a very unusual development, a large number of people in Barpeta district have submitted birth certificates issued in Nagaland. Those documents are being checked thoroughly,” he said.

“We also detected several forged documents of the Board of Secondary Education, Assam (SEBA) wherein the centre and roll numbers did not match with that of the names in the original certificates.”

The documents were of such 'good quality' that only proper verification could detect forgery.

Officers carrying out the verification also found some submitted documents with addresses of offices that do not exist.

The discovery of such forged documents have further complicated the work of the senior officers engaged in the process of updating the NRC as the court has asked to publish the updated register of citizens as soon as possible.

According to the Assam government, there are around 150,000 ‘D’ (doubtful) voters in the state.

Before the 2011 assembly elections, the Assam government had filed a petition in the court arguing that until a person was declared a foreigner by a foreigners’ tribunal, he or she should not be denied the right to vote.

But the court dismissed the state government's plea.

Hajela, while explaining the process of verification of the documents, said it was the most vital part of the whole process with around 66 million documents to be verified. So far, around 25 million documents have been verified with the house-to-house verification process being almost complete.

It is likely that the draft NRC will be completed by Mar 31.