Ramnath Goenka Award

Zishaan A Latif won the Ramnath Goenka Award in category of photo journalism for his photo essay, ‘The arduous struggle for inclusion in the NRC’, which was published in The Caravan in October 2019.

National Register of Citizens (NRC)

• The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a document containing the names of bona fide Indian citizens in that particular state and others are declared as illegal immigrants.
• It had been prepared for Assam and Tripura and on similar lines there is proposal for NRC at national level.

Arguments in favor of NRC

• Strengthen Internal Security: It will strengthen internal security of the nation by keeping a check on illegal migration. The influx of illegal migrants leads to threat of terrorist attack, riots and wars.
• Safeguard Rights of Native People: Illegal migrants have turned the tribal people into a minority in their own native land.Migrants are competing for jobs, land and hamper indigenous culture of native land. NRC will help to identify illegal migrants and deport them from state.
• Improve Governance: It will provide a verified database which will help to identify true beneficiaries and ensure effective implementation of schemes.

Arguments against NRC

• Affect Bilateral Relations: The implementation of NRC will affect India’s relation with neighboring countries like Bangladesh.
• State Polarization: The implementation of NRC will lead to further polarization of state and deep humanitarian crisis creating new fault lines.
• Chances of Error: There are chances of inclusion and exclusion errors in NRC list which can hamper human rights.
• Financial burden on People: People have to spend their life’s earning in legal fees in long process of submitting documents and challenging declaration of non-citizenship in courts.
• Administrative Blunders: There has been arbitrary rejection of gram panchayat certificates and non-transparent family tree verification whereby parents are on the list while children are not.