CENTRE LIKELY TO ALLOW RESIDENTS TO FILL THEIR NPR DETAILS ONLINE

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Important points

• The Centre will allow residents to fill the National Population Register (NPR) form on their own, through the online mode, a month before the door-to-door enumeration by Census officials starts.
• After filling the form online, residents will get a reference code that they can mention to the field enumerator at the time of her or his visit.
• Though no separate budget for the NPR has been allocated in this fiscal, 3,941.35 crore was approved for updating the NPR in 2019-20.

Phases:

• The first phase of the decennial Census exercise — the House-listing and Housing Census — along with updating the NPR was scheduled to be held from April 1, 2020.
• It was postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is unlikely to be held this year.
• The second and main phase of Census — the population enumeration — was to be concluded by March 5 this year.
• On January 21, 2020, residents were to be given an option to self-enumerate only in the second phase.
• As per an annual report of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, the option will now be made available for updating the NPR also.
• The NPR earlier collated in 2010 and 2015 has an electronic database of more than 119 crore residents.

What is NPR?

• NPR was first done in 2010 and was later updated in 2015 when it was linked with the Aadhar.
• But since the announcement of the NPR update has come in the middle of a raging controversy on the National Register of Citizens (NRC), there is widespread confusion between the two.
• The NPR is a register of the usual residents of the country. It contains information collected at the local (village/sub-town), subdistrict, district, state and national level under provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003.
• The Registrar-General of India (RGI) is presently conducting field trials of the first phase of the Census and the NPR through the mobile application in a block, each comprising 50-60 households, in all the States and Union Territories.

How is NPR different than census?

• While the process of NPR and Census will begin simultaneously, the two databases are not same.
• The decennial census is the largest single source of a variety of statistical information on different characteristics of the people of India.
• While NPR only contains demographic information, more details are required for census like information on demography, economic activity, literacy and education, and housing and household amenities besides others.
• The census is the basis for reviewing the country’s progress in the past decade, monitoring the ongoing schemes of the government and plan for the future.
• The census provides detailed and authentic information on demography, economic activity, literacy and education, housing and household amenities, urbanisation, fertility and mortality, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, language, religion, migration, disability besides others.
• The enumerators also collect data related to cultivators and agricultural labourers, their sex, occupational classification of workers in the non-households industry, trade, business, profession or service by class of worker and sex.
• There will be a detailed survey on gender and literacy rate, a number of towns, slum households and their population.
• Information is also collected on sources of potable water, energy, irrigation, method of farming, whether a house is a concrete, thatched or others.
• The census, 2021 will be done in two phases. In the first phase, the work of house-listing or housing census will be conducted from April to September 2020.
• In the second phase, the enumeration of the population will be done from February 9 to February 28, 2021, with reference moment as 00:00 hours of March 1, 2021.
• For snow-bound areas in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, the reference date will be October 1, 2020.
• With a history of more than 130 years, this reliable, time tested exercise has been bringing out a veritable wealth of statistics every 10 years, beginning from 1872 when the first census was conducted in India non-synchronously in different parts.

How is NPR different than NRC?

• National Population Register is a database of people living in India, citizens or not, but National Resgiter of Citizens is a database of Indian citizens.
• The NRC process demands proof of citizenship from the respondents. Those who found in wnat of the proof may face deportation or detention in long run.
• But in NPR, there is no need to provide any document.

Widespread dissent:

• The NPR’s link with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the yet to be implemented Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019, has been opposed by many States and civil society groups.
• The Citizenship Rules framed in the year 2003 say that the NPR is the first step towards the compilation of the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC), or the NRC.
• The CAA passed by the Parliament on December 11, 2019, allows citizenship on the basis of religion to six undocumented communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who entered India on or before December 31, 2014.
• Though the government has denied that the CAA and the NRC are linked, there are apprehensions that the CAA followed by a countrywide NRC, will benefit non-Muslims excluded from the proposed citizens’ register, while excluded Muslims will have to prove their citizenship.
• The Union Home Ministry informed the Lok Sabha on February 4, 2020 that “till now, the government has not taken any decision to prepare the NRIC at the national level”.
• However, in March 2020, the Ministry filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court that preparation of the NRC is a “necessary exercise for any sovereign country for mere identification of citizens from non-citizens”.
• It submitted that it is “the responsibility entrusted on the Central government “to identify/detect illegal migrants and thereafter, follow the due process of law”.
• At the peak of anti-CAA/NRC/NPR protest in the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a public rally on December 22 in Delhi that “there had been no discussion, no talk on an NRC for India since his government had taken power in 2014”.
• On December 9 the same year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah told Parliament that “there is no need to create a background for NRC, we are clear that NRC ought to be done in this country, our manifesto is the background”.

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES