GUWAHATI: The Assam government will stop issuing Aadhaar cards to adults, except for people from the Scheduled Castes (SC), the Scheduled Tribes (ST), and the tea garden communities. A Cabinet meeting chaired by CM Himanta Biswa Sarma on Thursday approved the decision to prevent fraudulent Aadhaar enrollment by illegal migrants.The government said District Commissioners will have the authority to issue Aadhaar cards to adults only in “rarest of rare” cases. The restriction will not apply for one year to SC, ST, and tea garden communities, during which time enrollment for left-out individuals from these groups will be completed.Sarma said the move comes amid efforts to apprehend illegal Bangladeshi migrants along the international border. “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,” he said.Earlier in April, the Assam government had announced a crackdown on Aadhaar cardholders who had not applied for inclusion in the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Sarma had also highlighted that four districts—Barpeta, Dhubri, Morigaon, and Nagaon—had more Aadhaar cardholders than their projected population.Meanwhile, Assam and Nagaland will jointly plant trees at Uriamghat in Golaghat district, where 12,000 bighas of encroached land were recently cleared. The land, near the Nagaland border, is claimed as ancestral land by some Nagaland villagers.
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