The Assam government has decided to stop issuing Aadhaar cards to adults, except for people belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and tea garden communities. The decision was taken at a Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Thursday.
Officials said the move is aimed at preventing illegal migrants from enrolling for Aadhaar using fraudulent means. District Commissioners will now have the authority to issue Aadhaar to adults only in “rarest of rare” cases. However, the restriction will not apply for one year to SC, ST, and tea garden communities, during which Aadhaar enrollment for left-out individuals from these groups will be completed.
Explaining the reason behind the decision, CM Sarma said, “For the past year, we have been continuously apprehending illegal migrants. We pushed back seven of them yesterday. We are not sure we can nab all of them, so we want to take some protection to prevent infiltrators from becoming Indian citizens with Aadhaar.”
In April this year, the Assam government had already announced a crackdown on Aadhaar cardholders who had not applied for inclusion in the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Sarma had also pointed out that in four districts—Barpeta, Dhubri, Morigaon, and Nagaon—the number of Aadhaar cardholders was higher than the projected population.
Meanwhile, the governments of Assam and Nagaland will jointly carry out tree plantation at Uriamghat in Golaghat district. The move comes after 12,000 bighas of “encroached land” were recently cleared in the area, which lies near the Nagaland border and is claimed by some Nagaland villagers as their ancestral land.
