NRC and NPR

The National Population Register (NPR) is a Register of usual residents of the country.
It is a comprehensive identity database maintained by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
It is being prepared at the local (Village/sub-Town), sub-District, District, State and National level under provisions of the Citizenship Act 1955 and the Citizenship Rules, 2003.
It is mandatory for every usual resident of India to register in the NPR.
A usual resident is defined for the purposes of NPR as a person who has resided in a local area for the past 6 months or more or a person who intends to reside in that area for the next 6 months or more.
NPR cannot be seen as a citizenship registration drive since it would include, for instance, any foreigner residing in a given locality for over six months.

The decennial census is the largest single source of a variety of statistical information on different characteristics of all persons in the country. The process began for the first time in 1872 when India was still under colonial rule.
The Census is carried out under the Census Act, 1948.
As opposed to this, the exercise of creating and maintaining a NPR began in the year 2010 to create a registry of usual residents of the country. NPR is conducted under the Citizenship Act 1955 and the Citizenship Rules, 2003.
The Census data does not aim to collect information about individuals but to give an overall picture of the status or condition of residents of India and the overall population trends.
The purpose of collecting and analyzing Census data is that it informs planning and policy, and helps in assessing the impact of existing government policies.
While the Census Act makes it compulsory for the government to keep the data collected during census confidential and anonymous, there is no such requirement of confidentiality for NPR data under the citizenship rules. The NPR is a register that will be in the public domain with data of individuals.

The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is the register containing names of Indian citizens.
NRC was prepared first in 1951 after the conduct of the Census of 1951.
It is being updated and that too only in Assam.
Now, it is not linked to census but one has to link oneself to a family member whose name had appeared either in the NRC of 1951, or to any of the state’s electoral rolls prepared till midnight of 24th march 1971.
If the applicant’s name is not on any of these lists, he can produce any of the 12 other documents dated up to March 24, 1971.

Popular movements between 1979 and 1985 against undocumented immigrants in Assam led to the Assam Accord.
The Assam Accord (1985) was a Memorandum of Settlement (MoS) signed between representatives of the Government of India and the leaders of the Assam Movement in New Delhi on 15 August 1985.
The Accord agreed that all those foreigners who had entered Assam between 1951 and 1961 were to be given full citizenship, including the right to vote.
Those who had done so after 1971 were to be deported; the entrants between 1961 and 1971 were to be denied voting rights for ten years but would enjoy all other rights of citizenship.
However, the provisions in the Assam accord were not implemented for a long time.
Finally the Supreme Court, which is supervising the entire process, has set a hard deadline of July 31 for the final NRC. Deadline was extended to August 31st later.

The final draft of NRC was released in August 2019 which excluded 19 lakh of the 3.29 crore applicants in Assam.
Each excluded person can file an appeal in Foreigners Tribunals.
The appellant then has the option of approaching the High Court and Supreme Court.

The foreigners tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies, unique to Assam, to determine if a person staying illegally is a “foreigner” or not.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has amended the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964, and has empowered district magistrates in all States and Union Territories to set up tribunals to decide whether a person staying illegally in India is a foreigner or not.
Earlier, the powers to constitute tribunals were vested only with the Centre.

The West Bengal Chief Minister spoke about the National Register of Citizens and National Population Register recently.

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