Union Cabinet approves proposal to update NPR

NEW DELHI: On Tuesday, the proposal of updating the National Population Register (NPR) was approved by the Union Cabinet, as it is considered to be the first step towards conducting an all-India National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise. The approval seeks to create a comprehensive identity database of every "usual resident" of the country.

The NPR is a database which shall be generated through house-to-house enumeration during the "house-listing" phase of the census, which is done once every 10 years and will be done next in the year 2021. It defines a "usual resident" as a person who has been residing in a place for six months or more and has the intention of residing in the place for another six months or more.

An honourable notification of July 31, 2019, had stated that the population register will be updated "in pursuance of sub-rule (4) of Rule 3 of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003".

In the year 2010, for the first time, the data for NPR was first collected during the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, along with the house-listing phase of Census 2011.

After a cabinet briefing which was held on Monday, Union minister Prakash Javadekar had said that no documents will be collected at the time of the door to door enumeration for creating the NPR database. "It is self-declaration," he said, adding that the government trusts citizens to give honest data.

He also said that giving details like passport number, Aadhar data, driving license, etc will be voluntary and no list of doubtful people will be prepared under NPR exercise, has been reported previously.

Several states had already started preparatory work on updating the NPR after the notification, other than two states West Bengal and Kerala – who have stopped working on it recently after the massive protests that have occurred against the Citizenship Amendment Act, making religion a criterion for obtaining citizenship, and the proposed NRC.

In the order given by the Bengal government, it had said NPR has "nothing to do" with the usual process of collecting Census in 2021, the government of Kerala had said it stopped work regarding 'apprehensions' of public fearing it would lead to NRC in the wake of the most criticized Citizenship Amendment Act.