On Eve Of NRC Release, People Throng Bengal Archives

The excluded seek certificates showing their ancestors’ names on the neighbouring State’s voters’ lists as legacy data

Barely hours before the publication of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Bishal Biswas sat at the office of the West Bengal State Archives in Kolkata, almost 1,000 km from his home in Rangia town of Assam’s Kamrup district. With the 23-year-old and three other members of his family, including his grandmother, finding their names missing from the NRC, Mr. Biswas was at the archives to trace legacy data.

Mr. Biswas’s late grandfather Suresh Biswas and grandmother Basana Biswas hailed from West Bengal’s Cooch Behar and he hoped to find their names in the voters list of the Tufanganj Assembly seat of Cooch Behar district. Mr. Biswas was accompanied by his friend and neighbour Chandan Das, who faces a similar predicament: the exclusion of the names of family members in the NRC. Both had arrived at the archives around 11 a.m., and hoped that they would get the certificates by evening.