Amid the ongoing protests over the Citizenship Act across the country, the Narendra Modi cabinet on Tuesday gave the green signal to a proposal to update the National Population Register (NPR). The exercise is to commence from April next year.
The cabinet that met in New Delhi has approved funds to the tune of over Rs 3941 crore for this Census-linked exercise, which many see as the first step towards a nationwide exercise to implement the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
It may be recalled here that the West Bengal and Kerala governments have stopped the NPR exercise, a week after the contentious bill to amend the Citizenship Act was passed by the Parliament.
According to the Census commission, the objective of the NPR will be to create a comprehensive identity database of every resident of the country.
The NPR is a list of "usual residents" of the country. A “usual resident” is defined, for the purposes of NPR, as a person who has resided in a local area for the past six months or more or a person who intends to reside in that area for the next six months or more.
This data was updated in 2015 through a door-to-door survey.
The digitisation of that updated information has been completed.
Now it has been decided to update the National Population Register along with the house-listing phase of Census 2021 from April to September 2020 in all the states/union territories, except Assam.