No one can deny that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR) may be relevant to identify the demographic data to help reach various development schemes of the government. Earlier we never heard such fancy names and the government too had all the information needed with only one exercise, the ‘Census.’
The decennial Census of India has been conducted 15 times, as of 2011. While it is undertaken every ten years, beginning in 1872 under the British Viceroy Lord Mayo, the first complete Census was taken in 1881. In 1948 India announced the Indian Census Act and all censuses after that were conducted under this Act. The last Census was conducted in 2011, and the next will be in 2021.
Indian Parliament passed the CAA recently, which is merely focussing on the additional inflow of people from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan and is also limited to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians. While letting them in, all details can be gathered and therefore CAA by itself will not conflict with the census job.
The Census is the basis for reviewing the country’s progress in the past decade, monitoring the ongoing schemes of the government and plan for the future. The Census provides detailed and authentic information on demography, economic activity, literacy and education, housing and household amenities, urbanisation, fertility and mortality, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, language, religion, migration, disability besides others.
The enumerators also collect data related to cultivators and agricultural labourers, their sex, occupational classification of workers in the non-households industry, trade, business, profession or service by class of worker and sex. The detailed survey included gender and literacy rate, number of towns, slum households and their population. Information is collected on sources of potable water, energy, irrigation, method of farming, whether a house is concrete, thatched or others.
The objective of the NPR, being carried out under the aegis of the Registrar General and ex-Officio Census Commissioner, India, is to create a comprehensive identity database of every usual resident in the country. The database would contain demographic as well as biometric particulars.
The demographic details of every individual are collected for every usual resident, one who usually resides for the last six months of the survey, which includes: name, relationship to head of household, father’s name, mother’s name, spouse’s name (if married), sex, date of birth, marital status, place of birth, nationality (as declared), present address of usual residence, duration of stay at present address, permanent residential address, occupation, educational qualification.
The data for NPR was last collected in 2010 along with the house listing phase of the Census 2011. Updating of this data was done during 2015 by conducting door to door survey.
The NRC, on the other hand, is an official record of those who are legal Indian citizens. It includes demographic information about all those individuals who qualify as citizens of India as per the Citizenship Act, 1955. The register was first prepared after the 1951 Census of India, and since then it has not been updated until recently.
Much confusion has been created by the government by varying stands taken by the President, the Home Minister and the Prime Minister on the issue of NRC and NPR, despite their assurances of NPR and NRC disconnected and independent from each other. An able system could do away with multiple surveys, which puts the poor into a state of severe discomfort, making such surveys tedious and time-consuming.
We have seen the rush to get Aadhar, which was soon dumped by the courts as not necessarily the definite proof of anything. Banks cannot even demand it anymore.
It is the job of the government to instil confidence while undertaking such vital exercises.
Sampath Kumar
Intrépide Voix
With inputs from Web and India Today
