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Mizoram to take back refugees if additional rice is allocated by Center
 Mizoram to take back refugees if additional rice is allocated by Center
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Agartala/Aizawl, Sept 2 (TIWN) The Mizoram government has agreed to take back over 37,000 tribal refugees, living in Tripura for almost 16 years

Ony If they got additional quantities of rice from the central government to provide free ration to the repatriated evacuees, officials said Tuesday.

“The Mizoram government would start taking back the tribal refugees after they got the additional quantities of rice through the Food Corporation of India (FCI),” an official of Mizoram government told reporters in Aizawl.

 He said : “Detailed arrangements for receiving the refugees who were willing to return to Mizoram are being made by Mamit district administration.”

“We have approached the central government to allocate additional quantities of rice. We are waiting for the allocation of foodgrains by the FCI,” the official said and added that the union home ministry had cleared all other requirements for the repatration.

The union home ministry has recently again asked the Mizoram government to take back the tribal refugees, living in Tripura for almost 16 years.

Tripura’s revenue department secretary Swapan Saha told reporters in Agartala : “In a separate letter, Tripura Chief Secretary Sanjay Kumar Panda requested his Mizoram counterpart L. Tochhong to take appropriate steps so that the refugees could go back home.”

Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar had met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde in New Delhi in July and requested their intervention.

Sarkar told the two central leaders that “continuous presence for over 16 years of refugees from Mizoram has been a matter of concern for Tripura”.

“The long stay of the refugees has its own socio-economic and law and order problems. The state government is providing necessary support for early repatriation of these families. However, the process has been extremely slow,” said Sarkar.

However, refugees have been insisting that without a formal agreement between the union, Mizoram and Tripura governments and tribal leaders, their rehabilitation will remain uncertain.

The Reang refugees, lodged since October 1997 in six makeshift camps in Kanchanpur sub-division of north Tripura, 180 km north of Agartala, have sent several memoranda to the prime minister and the union home minister in support of their 18-point charter of demands.

In the past, around 4,500 refugees had returned in 2010 and 2011 following continued persuasion by Mizoram and home ministry officials. However, the process got stalled after that.

The tribals, locally called ‘Bru’, had fled after ethnic clashes with the majority Mizos over the killing of a Mizo forest official.

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