The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a concept and a register of all Indian citizens, mandated by the Citizenship Act, 1955, as amended in 2003. Its purpose is to document legal citizens to identify and screen out illegal immigrants.
The first NRC was prepared in 1951 in Assam following the census, but was not maintained thereafter. The recent exercise was driven by the long-standing issue of undocumented migration, particularly from Bangladesh, and was updated in Assam under the supervision of the Supreme Court, beginning in 2013.
The mechanism for the NRC is prescribed by the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. For the Assam update, applicants had to prove their or their ancestors' presence in India on or before the cut-off date of midnight, March 24, 1971, which was established by the Assam Accord of 1985. This proof is established by linking to the 1951 NRC or Electoral Rolls up to the cut-off date, collectively known as Legacy Data. Individuals excluded from the final list, which was published on August 31, 2019, must appeal to Foreigners Tribunals.
The NRC is intrinsically linked to Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, which empowers the Central Government to compulsorily register every citizen and maintain the register. A recent development is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA), which grants an accelerated path to citizenship for six non-Muslim religious communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan who entered India before December 31, 2014. While the NRC was updated in Assam, the government has stated that no decision has been taken to prepare a nationwide NRC.