New Delhi: The Union home ministry, in an answer to a Lok Sabha question, did not specify the “categories of valid documents” that someone would need to prove citizenship in India. It said that citizenship is governed by the Citizenship Act, 1955 and its rules, the Ministry said.Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) member Sudama Prasad had, in the Lok Sabha, asked for the “details of categories of valid documents that are required for people to prove citizenship in India”, and the “total number of birth certificates issued nationwide during the last 25 years and whether the Government received reports about low coverage of issuance of birth and death certificates vis-à-vis number of births and deaths by the State Government and the list of top 10 States”.To this, minister of state for home, Nityanand Rai, has written in reply, “The citizenship of India is governed under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955, and rules made thereunder.”“It can be acquired by birth (Section 3), by decent (Section 4), by registration (Section 5), by naturalization (Section 6) or by incorporation of territory (Section 7) of the Citizenship Act, 1955. The eligibility criteria for acquisition and determination of citizenship is as per the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955 and rules made thereunder,” Rai said.Rai answered the second part of Prasad’s question with a table of the state-wise and nationwide breakdown of the total number of registered births during the last 25 years.While the home ministry has not given the list of documents it considers valid to prove citizenship, the ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR) of electoral rolls which is underway in Bihar lists 11 documents for inclusion in the rolls. Among them is the birth certificate but the list crucially does not have the Aadhaar card, the voter ID card or the ration card.In the course of the Supreme Court hearing challenges to the SIR exercise, it has said that “citizenship is an issue to be determined not by the Election Commission of India, but by the MHA,” only for it to be told by the poll body that it has the power to scrutinise citizenship. Sixty five lakh people have been kept out of the draft electoral rolls in Bihar, but it is not clear on what grounds each has been removed.In Assam, The Wire’s reports show how evicted Muslim families are being struck off the electoral rolls. For such people, whose voter ID cards will no longer be valid, the answer to which documents will be, remains crucial.Follow The Wire’s coverage of the Bihar SIR here.