If Passports and Aadhaar Cards Do Not Prove National Citizenship, Is the Government Planning a Nationwide NRC Under the Pretext of a National Identity Card?
If this is the case, it could prove to be a highly complex challenge in practice—one that leaves the citizens of this country standing in queues for years and severely disrupts the country's administrative machinery.
Although governments have long been considering a single, sovereign document that serves as the ultimate proof of citizenship, the legal framework for creating this "Master Card" of citizenship—such as a National Identity Card—already exists on paper. However, in a vast, diverse, and under-documented country like India, this presents a colossal entanglement.
The financial cost of a nationwide NRC could run into billions and trillions of rupees, becoming a massive burden on the country's economy.
Millions of government employees—including teachers, tehsildars, and clerks—would have to be deployed for this task for years, completely paralyzing regular public administration and services.
The country has already witnessed a small trailer of the NRC in Assam. The NRC process in just one state cost approximately ₹1,600 crore and took over 10 years to complete.
In the final list, around 1.9 million (19 lakh) people were excluded, many of whom had family members registered on the list. This included relatives of former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and retired officers of the Indian Army.
A vast segment of India's population, particularly in rural areas, among the poor, tribal communities, and migrants, still does not possess definitive documents regarding their birth or lineage.
Before 1989–90, the practice of generating digital birth certificates was virtually non-existent in the country.
Due to floods, fires, displacement, or poverty, millions of people have lost their old records. In such a scenario, demanding decades-old legal proof from over 1.3 billion people would be nothing short of a nightmare.
Spelling mistakes in names, surnames, or age are extremely common in Indian government documents. In Assam, millions of people got entangled in proving their citizenship simply due to mismatched spellings.
And finally, the biggest practical question is: if at the end of the process, a few million or crore people fail to prove their citizenship—even if strictly due to a lack of documentation—what will the government do with them?
Will they be kept in Detention Centers? Building and operating detention centers on such a massive scale is practically impossible on both financial and humanitarian fronts.
Furthermore, such individuals cannot be deported to countries like Bangladesh or Myanmar either, because until those nations accept them as their own citizens, they would become 'Stateless' under international law.
These are the exact challenges that forced previous governments to tread very cautiously, despite having the legal framework ready on paper. This caution exercised by past administrations is presented by the current government as an accusation before the public, claiming that previous regimes sheltered infiltrators.
Ultimately, these are the very economic and social challenges due to which the decision to implement this at a national level has always remained a highly sensitive issue for past governments.
