New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government has told the Supreme Court that even seven years after 1.9 million people were excluded from Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), the process of issuing rejection slips to them has not begun, reported Hindustan Times.The issuing of rejection slips is important as only after this step is completed, the people excluded from the final list could challenge their exclusion before foreigners tribunals.“Enactment of the security regime for NRC data by the state coordinator is under progress and hence data has not been shared with the Registrar General of India,” the Registrar General of India (RGI) told the Supreme Court in an affidavit on September 28, adding that the RGI could notify the final NRC only after the data was shared.The RGI also told a bench of justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe that the process of issuing rejection slips “has not been started yet” by the state NRC coordinator.On August 13, 2019, the Supreme Court had directed the protection of the NRC data through a security regime similar to that Aadhaar data.The latest affidavit says that this security regime is still under preparation.On September 28, the Supreme Court adjourned the matter to November 6 after the Assam government sought time to file its response.Back in 2012, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had instructed the BJP government in Assam to “immediately” issue rejection slips to applicants who had failed to enter their names in the residents’ list.As many as 3.29 crore residents of the northeastern state had applied to be included in the NRC which was updated for the first time after 1951. When the final updated NRC was made public by the RGI in Guwahati in 2019, as many as 19, 06,657 people were left out of the official record.