The National Population Register, a list of residents of India, is the first step to creating a National Register of Citizens. Once an NRC...
The National Population Register, a list of residents of India, is the first step to creating a National Register of Citizens. Once an NRC is created, any resident excluded from it will be legally identified as an “illegal migrant” and can be prosecuted under Indian law.
This connection with the NRC has made the NPR – backend work for which has already started – an extremely controversial process, with many Indians claiming they would refuse to submit their family data to enumerators.
While the NPR is a Union government-led exercise, the actual data collection will be done by state government employees. The controversy has led two states, West Bengal and Kerala, to halt the NPR process altogether. However, many states have also asked (or are considering asking) the Centre to scrap the 2020 NPR questionnaire and revert to the 2010 one.
The 2020 NPR contains eight additional data fields compared to 2010, the most controversial of which are new questions on parents’ birthplace and date of birth. Since parents’ citizenship status is a critical data point in determining Indian citizenship, critics of the new questionnaire argue that it would allow the government to use the NPR data to generate an NRC. By corollary, this means that reverting to the 2010 NPR, which has no explicit question on...
