Govt to digitally update National Population Register during Census
Sources aware of the development said that the digital update of the NPR would include self-updating, under which it is proposed to allow residents to update their own data fields after following authentication protocols on a web portal.
A senior government official said the Census exercise for 2027 will be undertaken in the same format, which was followed in 2011.
The last Census was conducted in 2011 in two phases — Phase I included ‘House Listing’ and Phase II involved ‘Population Enumeration’.
While ‘House Listing’ means counting the number of houses, ‘Population Enumeration’ means counting the number of persons living in houses listed in the first phase.
Caste enumeration, which is part of the Census 2027 exercise, will be done in the second phase during population enumeration, the sources said further.
However, the government faces the challenge of updating the central list of OBCs as it will be required to enumerate castes, said one of the sources.
As states also have their own list of OBCs, which differ state-wise, these too will require update, if they come up for reference for caste enumeration.
As reported by The Tribune on June 18, till now the Census enumeration forms had three categories — namely for SCs, STs and Others. For the 2027 exercise, there is a possibility of including OBCs as the third category in place of ‘Others’, indicated the sources.
In the current scenario, under the ‘Others’ category, even those belonging to ‘General’ category were bracketed with OBCs. However, officials will now have to work out the modalities as to where the ‘General’ category population be placed if OBCs are mentioned as the third category.
Updating the NPR is therefore essential to incorporate caste enumeration. A pre-test on the NPR update has already been undertaken in the selected areas of all states and Union Territories, except Assam, along with the pre-test of Census, the official sources said.
For digitally updating NPR, the demographic and other particulars of each family and individual are to be collected and updated during the exercise to update NPR. However, no documents or biometrics would be collected during the update, they added.
The Government had prepared a National Population Register (NPR) of all ‘usual residents’ in the country in 2010 by collecting specific information of each resident.
The NPR was prepared under various provisions of the Citizenship Rules, 2003, framed under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
In 2015, a few fields such as name, gender, date and place of birth, place of residence and father’s and mother’s name were updated and Aadhaar, mobile and ration card numbers were collected.
To incorporate changes due to birth, death and migration, a need arose to update it again.
The government decided to update the NPR database in the entire country, except Assam, along with the ‘House-Listing’ phase of Census-2021, during April-September 2020, according to the convenience of the states and UTs.
Assam was excluded from the initial NPR (National Population Register) exercise because it had recently undergone an NRC (National Register of Citizens) exercise to identify and document its residents
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, however, the work on updating NPR and other related field activities got postponed.
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