The Guwahati junior advocate and the citizenship appeals backlog
📋 Priya Bora, 29 — Guwahati legal-aid advocate for NRC-affected families. She has filed 127 citizenship appeals since 2019—all pending. Her clients are scattered across eight states. She tracks every case manually in a steel register. She has not slept properly in seven years. In March 2025, she ran out of paper for her case tracker and did not have the ₹300 to replace the register. That was the moment the system nearly broke.
🚨 The problem
Citizenship law in India requires appealing through Foreigners Tribunals, High Court petitions, and tracking statutory deadlines across multiple courts and tribunals. Priya's 127 cases involved: tribunal dates scattered across five tribunal offices in different states, 60-day appeal windows that close silently, ASLSA reimbursements averaging 2.3 years late, and cases going "ex parte" (advocate not appearing) due to sheer coordination load. By March 2025, when Priya ran a manual count, she discovered eight of her 41 scheduled hearings had already occurred without her knowledge. The tribunal office in Golaghat had issued a fresh date with email notification to a client whose email was four years out of date. The cases were not dismissed yet, but they were marked "ex parte"—the advocate did not appear. The next hearing would be harder to win. The DLSA's response to her query: she was the one responsible. Her reputation was at risk. Her case load was at capacity. She was one person.
🚀 How GabFORGE helped
In late March 2025, a junior advocate colleague mentioned a case-management system that had been developed for Assam-based advocates—one that integrated the NRC portal, the e-Courts database, and the Foreigners Tribunal master list. Anmol, a trainee lawyer, had written it over six months. He came to Priya's chamber with a tablet. The system, set to Assamese, did the rest. It hit the NRC portal and pulled live tribunal dates, hearing statuses, and order dates. Immediately it surfaced: eight missed hearings, three cases with appeal deadlines closing in the next 30 days, twelve cases waiting for ASLSA reimbursement for more than two years, and a calendar showing nineteen hearings scheduled in the next six weeks, four of which were scheduled for the same day in two different tribunal offices 60 km apart. The agent then generated petition templates for the three closing-deadline cases, drawn from Assamese case law and Priya's own successful precedents. For the eight ex parte cases, it drafted "permission to revert" petitions. The agent flagged RTI queries for the 2-year-overdue reimbursements. Over the next four weeks, the system helped Priya reorganize her intake. Four of the eight ex parte cases received new hearing dates. The three closing-deadline cases were filed in time. Two of the overdue reimbursements were located through RTI queries and reimbursed. By June 2025, Priya had 134 cases, knew the status of all of them, and had hired a part-time clerk to assist with e-Courts filings. For the first time since 2019, she slept until 7 AM on a Saturday morning without a case deadline waking her at 5.
🇮🇳 Why this matters
There are 300–500 advocates in Guwahati specializing in NRC and citizenship law serving 50,000 pending cases. The median case backlog is 3.2 years, with High Court petitions adding 2–3 more. For a young advocate working alone, the system that is failing families is also failing the advocate. The problem is not law skill; it is load. An agent that can surface a case-dying-in-the-system faster than paper tracking lets the advocate focus on the family's case instead of the calendar.
Visibility transformed the bottleneck: 127 cases held, 134 cases manageable.