The offer by the federal government to give citizenship to all permanent residents (PR) who are 60 years and above has been described as "laudable" by various quarters.

Although a similar campaign was conducted in June 2014, not everyone is happy about the offer.

"There seems to be a curious scheme behind all this needless campaigns," said N Ganesan, a member of the Hindraf People’s Movement.

"A closer look will reveal the lies behind all of this," he added.

Ganesan cited official statistics by the Special Implementation Task Force on the Indian Community (SITF) under the Prime Minister’s Department which has estimated that there are still more than 30,000 people with non-citizen status.

These are especially people from the Indian community with red identity cards.

Ganesan claimed that the SITF official said the government acknowledged this problem and had taken steps to tackle it with the MyDaftar programme since February 2011.

The programme saw 4,155 out of the total 6,527 applications being approved.

SITF statistics also revealed that 1,479 of these applicants were born before independence while only 155 applications were rejected.

"(These are) sordid statistics indeed," said Ganesan.

"There are 1,500 who may potentially get a blue IC out of an estimated 30,000 through this initiative," he added.

"(Now) that makes it 5 % of the total applicants at best who may succeed (in getting a blue IC)," he noted.

"This means 95 % of the stateless red IC holders are left untouched. Can any initiative do worse?"he asked.

Ganesan pointed out that there are several other significant categories of stateless people.

The true extent of the problem is yet to be established, he said.

"We can expect that the officially accepted number of 30,000 in this category alone is understated and for obvious political reasons," he added.

Ganesan said that a red IC holder is not a national of Malaysia.

He recalled that on April 18, 2013, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak had signed a landmark agreement with Persatuan Hindraf Malaysia to address the problem of stateless people with the aim of resolving it in a comprehensive manner.

However, he said nothing has happened.

He said all these campaigns (to give citizenship to PR holders) were totally ineffective.