AIZAWL: On the first day of the repatriation process ton Wednesday, over 40 Bru families came forward for identification at the Kaskau relief camp in North Tripura before the Mizoram government officials who are there to identify the bona fide residents of the state.
Deputy Commissioner of Mamit district in Mizoram bordering Tripura, Lalbiaksangi, who is heading a team of 30 officials,told PTI over phone from Kaskau camp that the identification process was undertaken peacefully.
Brus, who were enrolled in the 1995 Mizoram voters’ lists and their descendants were accepted as bona fide residents of the state, she said.
Around 500 families were lodged in the Kaskau relief camp and the task became difficult as the Tripura government did not have any proper record of those lodged in the six relief camps and deaths and births were also not registered, she added.
“A 30-member team of Mizoram government officials led by the state’s Mamit district Deputy Commissioner Lalbiaksangi arrived in north Tripura on Tuesday, and from today (Wednesday) they started the identification process,” Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Kanchanpur Sub-Division Santosh Deb stated on Wednesday.
He said: “The identification process would continue till November 21. After that the schedule of repatriation of refugees from Tripura to Mizoram would be finalised.”
The identification process was the beginning of the proposed eighth phase physical repatriation of 3,445 Bru families lodged in the six relief camps in North Tripura district and is scheduled to continue till November 21.
As per the schedule of the Road Map-V for Bru Repatriation, the physical repatriation was to commence from November 30.
As per the proposal, 2,594 repatriated families would be resettled in Mamit district while Kolasib district bordering Assam and south Mizoram’s Lunglei district would host 628 and 223 Bru families respectively.
Thousands of Bru left Mizoram and migrated to Tripura en-masse after Bru militants gunned down a forest guard near Persang hamlet inside the Mizoram-Bangladesh-Tripura border Dampa Tiger Reserve on October 21, 1997.
The Brus were lodged in six relief camps at the Kanchanpur Sub-Division of North Tripura, of which 1,686 families have been repatriated since 2010 till date.
The efforts to repatriate the rest of the community in the relief camps during June one to September four last year was unsuccessful as not a single Bru came forward for identification before the Mizoram officials in the relief camps.
The ministry also verbally agreed to extend Rs 1.3 lakh housing scheme under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana to each family, said the MBDPF leader, but added his doubts about the repatriation in the near future. (PTI)
