Guwahati, April 25: The Assam State Jamiat Ulama has submitted a memorandum to Union minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju and the Registrar General of India, Rohitash Nariman, on its demands regarding the update of the National Register of Citizens, 1951.

A delegation of the Jamiat, led by its president Badruddin Ajmal, met both Rijiju and Nariman in New Delhi yesterday and requested them to concede to their demands, which include extension of the deadline to receive NRC applications till October.

The NRC is a register that contains the details of all Indian citizens. It will be updated based on NRC 1951, electoral rolls up to the midnight of March 24, 1971 and in their absence the list of admissible documents of pre-1971 period.

House-to-house distribution of NRC application forms will start by the end of April and will be completed by May. The receipt of application forms will start in May and close in July.

"Assam faces heavy floods and erosion from May to July when the monsoon is at its peak. So, the deadline for receiving NRC applications must be extended up to October so that each and every family can apply from the flood-prone areas without any hassle," Ajmal said in the memorandum.

The memorandum said since there is only a month for receiving claims and objections, the applicants must be informed during scrutiny or verification regarding the status of their application forms. Such a system will help applicants to obtain necessary documents for inclusion of their names in the NRC, it said.

The Jamiat Ulama has demanded that a high-level monitoring mechanism must be put in place to look after functioning of the seva kendras set up across Assam to assist citizens with necessary documents to fill up the application forms. The Jamiat complained that the voter list of 1970 and the partial voter list of 1966 have been published in the NRC seva kendras and the NRC website. It demanded complete publication of the 1966 voter list as well as the 1952, 1954, 1959 and 1962 lists.

A special arrangement should be functional at each seva kendra for issuance of legacy data code in case of non-availability of data in the computer search engine provided copies of NRC 1951 and the voter list prior to 1971, which are available with the public, the memorandum said.

Accusation: The Barak Valley Human Rights Protection Society today questioned the legal validity of different cut-off yardsticks for updating the NRC, accusing the government of framing modalities in an "arbitrary and whimsical" manner. General secretary of the society, Niladri Roy, said, "We would probably file a petition before the Supreme Court next month challenging the cut-off yardsticks of the government."

Working president of the society, Dhruba Kumar Saha, asked that if the NRC was updated in 1951 across the country based on census, then why was it not being updated according to the 2011 census now.

Additional reporting by Nilotpal Bhattacharjee in Silchar