National Population Register

The National Population Register (NPR) is a Register of usual residents of the country.
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 data for the NPR is generated through house-to-house enumeration during the “house-listing” phase of the census, which is held once in 10 years.
- It was collected in 2010 alongwith the houselisting phase of Census of India 2011. The update of this data was done during 2015 by conducting a door to door survey.
- Now, the government has decided to update the NPR along with the Houselisting phase of Census 2021 in all the States/UTs except Assam.
- Assam has been excluded because the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise has already been conducted in the state.

Both the NPR and Census are conducted by the Office of the Registrar General under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

NPR will collect both demographic data and biometric data. For biometric data it will depend on Aadhaar, for which it will seek Aadhaar details of the residents.

The objective of the NPR is to create a comprehensive identity database of every usual resident in the country. It will help the government formulate its policies better and also aid national security.
It will streamline data of residents across various platforms and ease the life of those residing in India by cutting red tape.

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 office of the Registrar General of India has said the questionnaire of the National Population Register is being finalised.

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