With the advent of the Janata Government in 1977, some of them were given citizenship, but a large number were left out. In addition, the GOI’s rehabilitation policy aimed at scattering the oustees in different pockets along the Indo-Pak border. This damaged their political will and fragmented their culture. After nearly three decades in India many oustees are still devoid of citizenship and land rights. They live in extremely harsh conditions with vary little civic amenities and at the same time being outside the ambit of all the government sponsored welfare schemes for the poor. Being war-displaced, the oustees have experienced decisive social, cultural and economic change in their lives.

The most obstructive factor in the development of Pak-oustees and indeed the factor most widely used in their exploitation is that many are not legally citizens of India. Out of the total of approximately over a lakh Pak-oustees, around 8000 of them are still without citizenship. Although they have applied for citizenship they do not know where in the unyielding and unending bureaucratic procedures their forms have reached. Those who have come in the 1980s have come with their visas and they apply for visa renewal every five years, for which they pay through their nose, not to mention the cumbersome process they have to go through.

The issue becomes more complicated as government officials, even when they gave citizenship to some of the Pak-oustees, gave it only to those above 21 years of age. Now there are approximately 2000 individuals who are without citizenship since they were less than 21 years of age when they migrated. Their children, who have been born and brought-up in India have also been denied citizenship. However, they enjoyed voting rights until 1993, when someone complained that they are not citizens, at the time when the voters’ identity cards were being made. They have been declared "non-citizens" ever since.

The second problem is with regard to land ownership, and is faced basically by those who came across in 1972, after the war. This group stayed in refugee camps for almost a decade. In the camps they (the refugees) were issued a ration card per family. The head of the family, in who’s name the ration card had been issued, had to report daily for a security/surveillance related roll-call. Free rations were also distributed on the basis of the card. These rations were too meager to support the entire family, and a supplement in the form of an income was required to survive. The young able-bodied men thus resorted to working as casual labourers in neighbouring villages. But the daily roll-call system severely hampered their ability to leave the camps for this purpose. So the refugees, as a coping strategy, clubbed together many nuclear families into one large extended family, usually headed by the aging patriarch. This left the younger men free to search for work. This background is important, because the issuing of ration cards on the basis of these extended families led to a problem affecting a huge chunk of the 1,00,000- odd families that were in the refugee camps in Chotan. In the R&R (Relief and Rehabilitation) package offered to the refugee families, land was distributed (75 or 50 bighas of rain-fed land, depending on the district the families were to be settled) on the basis of the ration cards. Thus there are cases when families with as many as 50 members were considered as one unit and were given 1 murba. This flawed rehabilitation policy has caused widespread landlessness among the Pak-oustees. This is the story of the Pak-oustees in Western Rajasthan where the issue of landlessness is otherwise non-existent.