India may be building detention centres in Assam to detain local residents left out of the National Registrar of Citizens (NRC).
According to an article by National Herald, the Assam government is using local people to build what looks like concentration camps 160km away from Guwahati, for those who did not fit the requirements to get into the NRC, and thus are deemed foreigners.
The detention centre is being built in Domini (Matia), a Muslim majority district in Goalpara district at a cost of Rs45 crore, and is designed to detain 3000 people.
There are watch towers at the four corners; a police outpost at the entrance; high boundary walls with sharp shards of glass embedded on top, Herald reports. At least, that is what the camp is going to look like at the end of construction work, workers – with a deadline in December 2019 – have said.
A water tank and quarters for the officers have been built, but the rooms for the inmates are under construction. There will be separate living quarters for men and women.
An area within the compound has been demarcated for a hospital and a school is being built just outside the building. According to the workers, the buildings are likely to be more than 10 storeys.
The work at this detention centre had begun in December 2018. This imposing centre in Goalpara is one of the eleven detention centres under construction.
Meanwhile, Mumbai Mirror reported the state government has identified land in Navi Mumbai for Maharashtra's first detention centre for illegal immigrants.
The Home Department wrote to City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco), the planning authority for Navi Mumbai, seeking a 3 acre plot in Nerul for the detention centre.
While sources in the state Home Department refused to divulge the exact location of the proposed detention centre in Nerul, Mirror reported, they said the plot has a structure which was still recently being used by an NGO.
Principal Secretary (special) of the Home Department, Amitabh Gupta, said the process to identify the land for a detention centre started back in July, when the Union government sent instructions to all state governments in this regard.
According the "2019 Model Detention Manual" – released by the Union government – every city or district, which has a major immigration check post, must have a detention centre.
While the state Home Department on September 6 refused to share specific numbers, an official said currently, there are a "large number of illegal immigrants, especially Bangladeshi citizens, Mumbai." The process of repatriation is lengthy; a detention centre is thus necessary.
But the source said these detention centres will not be like jails – where the immigrants are currently being detained. "It will have all the facilities detainees are entitled to."
According to the model detention manual, detained family members must not be separated from each other, and every centre must have a crèche.
The National Herald reported that at least 25 people have died in detention centres inside jails in Assam, where they were lodged since being declared alien by tribunals.
Currently, the state has six detention centres inside district jails in Tezpur, Dibrugarh, Jorhat, Silchar, Kokrajhar and Goalpara.
An editorial published on Scroll.in also talked about the detention centres, pointing out the detention centre in Mumbai and the reported instruction from the Union government to states to build a detention centre at every major centre for immigration.
A Reuters story brought out the complexity of the situation: workers building one detention centre are themselves uncertain if they can prove their citizenship, and so might end up being detained there, the editorial said.
But it also talked about the latent gravity of the situation: these detention centres, which bring up uncomfortable 20th century parallels, cannot possibly hold the millions of people likely to end up there.
