Govt to prepare National Population Register along with Census 2011 - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The Union Government has said that it will prepare a National Population Register (NPR) along with Census 2011, the 15th National Census of the country. NPR, an identity database of all usual residents in the country, contains specific items of information of each individual of the country. It is meant to create a comprehensive identity database in the country, which would help in better targeting of the benefits and services under the government schemes and programmes. The availability of such a data base along the length and breadth of the country will impart a new direction to the overall governance by not only better targeting of the benefits and services under the government schemes/programmes, but also by better planning. NPR would also serve the requirement of enhancing the internal security of the country apart from sprucing up tax collection and targeting welfare schemes better in areas like education, rural development health and social security. The NPR will be created under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and Citizenship Rules (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards), 2003. The Government has also notified the intention for undertaking the creation of NPR, and Rs. 3539.24 crores have been for its creation. The creation of NPR of usual residents of the country involves the collection of specific information on each person residing in the country. It would cover an estimated population of 1.2 billion, and the database will be built, maintained and updated by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India. NPR will include the items of information such as the name of the person, father's name, mother's name, spouse's name, sex, date of birth, place of birth, current marital status, education, nationality as declared, occupation, present address of usual resident and permanent residential address. The database will also contain photograph and ten-finger biometry of persons above the age of 15 years. As the preparation of NPR involves house-to-house enumeration, this shall be undertaken along with the Houselisting and Housing Operations of Census 2011. The NPR schedules will be canvassed by the same enumerators appointed for Houselisting. The NPR schedules will be scanned and data will be entered in two languages - in local languages and in English. After the NPR database's finalization, the next task would be assigning every individual a Unique Identification Number (UID) by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The UIDAI will undertake biometrics based de-duplication and assign UID numbers to each resident. The cleaned database along with UID number will form the final NPR database. The UID of each individual in the NPR database will become the link number between the sectoral data bases, thus bringing about a host of conceivable benefits.