More than 350 people become Indian nationals under CAA
Indian citizenship on Wednesday under the newly notified Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019. While the first set of 14 people received it in the national capital, the rest were granted nationality digitally in other parts of the country.
Some of the applications were cleared even before the notification of the rules in March this year, officials said.
Home secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla handed over the certificates to the 14 people in the national capital after their applications were processed online through a designated portal, an official spokesperson said. Sources said the Election Commission of India (ECI) was intimated regarding the grant of citizenship certificates since the model code of conduct was in force.
This comes more than two months after the rules under the contentious law were notified to grant citizenship to persecuted non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Union home minister Amit Shah during an interview with ET on May 7, 2024, said that more than 25,000 applications have been received under CAA and the process was on to issue citizenship certificates. On Wednesday, Shah in a post on 'X' termed it a "historic day".
The CAA rules envisage the manner of application form, procedure for processing applications by the district-level committee (DLC), scrutiny and grant of citizenship by state-level empowered committee (SLEC).
«In pursuance of these rules, applications have been received from persons belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi and Christian communities
