At least 500 suspected Bangladeshi citizens living in the relief camps set up in Assam after the July violence have crossed back into their country,fearing detection during the ongoing scrutiny process,a Home Ministry official said. Nearly two lakh people are reported to be still living in the over 200 relief camps in the state,where a verification process is underway to establish their identities. Following reports that a large number of people had gone missing from the camps,intelligence agencies tracked the movement of some towards Bangladesh. These people are believed to have used the river route from Dhubri district to cross over. A state government official said the local administration had been informed about this movement by the Intelligence Bureau but did not have any independent confirmation. He said the missing people could also be freeloaders who had come to the camps for food and other benefits,but fled as soon as the verification exercise started. During the first stage of verification,about 12,000 families translating to about 90,000 people living in these camps produced land documents to establish that they are genuine residents of the state. They are likely to be rehabilitated to their villages over the next one month,the state government official said. For the remaining people,the administration will seek other verification documents like enrollment in school registers or in the electoral lists which would require a little more scrutiny,the official said. Meanwhile,the state government has asked the Home Ministry to set up 64 additional tribunals to detect and deport illegal immigrants living in Assam. At present 36 such tribunals are functioning and they have to decide 3.2 lakh cases. We have requested the Centre to set up more courts for expeditious disposal of these cases. And in view of the shortage of judges to be appointed to these tribunals,we have also requested the Centre to amend the rules so that that senior lawyers,who are otherwise eligible to be appointed as judges,can be allowed to man these tribunals, another state government official said. This official claimed that the current tribunals had decided about 1.4 lakh cases in which about 60,000 people have been found to be illegal immigrants. About 2,400 of these have been deported to Bangladesh. The process of deportation of the remaining ones are in various stages of progress. Many of them have gone missing or have changed their names, he said. Gogoi: Influx continues but on decline Guwahati: Infiltration from Bangladesh was still on,but on a much lower scale than before,Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said on Wednesday. He said this was because of various measures taken by his government in the past one decade or more,including strengthening of the border security and setting up more tribunals to try cases of the suspected migrants. I wont say that illegal migration has stopped. It is there,but there has been a decline, he said. Gogoi also lashed out at BJPs L K Advani and former chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta of the AGP and asked them to compare the efforts taken by their governments with those of his. ENS
