As per the Registral General of India the National Population Register (NPR) is a Register of usual residents of the country. It is being prepared at the local (Village/sub-Town), sub-District, 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 actual genesis if this is a little convoluted. This was P Chidambaram’s pet project way back 2011 targeted at states with international crossings to map citizens versus aliens in the border districts.
If the political grape vine is to be believed, the then Home Minister and his ministry were at logger head with Aadhar, which was being launched at the same time under Nandan Nilekani. This reporter remembers then registrar general distinguishing the two as proof of identity (in case of Aadhar) and proof of citizenship (NPR).
In Jun 2011 then Home Minister P Chidambaram wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh complaining that the NPR project is “almost at a standstill” due to the refusal of UIDAI to accept the NPR data for de-duplication and generation of Aadhaar numbers. Following the protest, the government had directed the UIDAI to accept the biometric data collected by RGI under the Home Ministry to give unique ID number to every citizen.
With time NPR lost its importance, with interest being rekindled as Registrar General gets ready for his next census in 2021 (last one was in 2011, and this is a 10-year exercise).
What is surprising is the fact that demonetisation had already forced much of India to provide their biometrics under Aadhar – as such the question should have had been why NPR should be run as a separate exercise or as an extension to Aadhar data. Also, the fact that things like CKYC can be directly latched on to the same database cannot be ignored.
However, it seems, once again Home Ministry has found its favourite hound, free of restrictions that Aadhar authority self imposes. In the name of national security duplication of effort is all but justified after all 8,500 Crore rupees is just another ‘other expense’ for the government that is finding it hard to pay GST share of states to states.
