India okays funds for NPR
from page 16
a long form. There will be a mobile app for people to upload their details. It’s self-declaration. No document is required. No proof is required. No biometric is required. This is already accepted by all the states. All the states have already notified it,” Javadekar said.
“NPR will be used as NRC we have never said, never meant,” Javadekar replied when a reporter pointed out that Union Minister Kiren Rijiju in July 2014 told parliament that the “government will create the NRC based on information from the NPR by verifying citizenship”.
The NPR is a list of “usual residents” of the country. A “usual resident” is defined for the purpose of NPR as a person who has resided in a local area for the past six months or more or a person who intends to reside in that area for the next six months or more, home ministry officials said.
The data for NPR was last collected in 2010 along with the house-listing phase of Census of India 2011. The data was updated in 2015 by conducting door-to-door survey. The digitisation of the updated information has been completed.
Now it has been decided to update the NPR along with the house-listing phase of Census 2021 during April to September next year in all the states and federally-ruled territories except Assam, according to the website of the Office of the Registrar General, and Census Commissioner.
Assam has been excluded because the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise has already been conducted in the state.
The NPR will be prepared at the local (village/sub-town), sub-district, district, state and national level under provisions of the Citizenship Act 1955 and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. It is mandatory for every usual resident of India to register in the NPR, according to the officials.
The objective of the NPR is to create a comprehensive identity database of every usual resident in the country. The database would contain demographic as well as biometric particulars, officials said.
Meanwhile, Indian authorities yesterday stepped up security and shut down the internet in various places as nationwide protests against citizenship law and NRC were escalating.
An interior ministry official said the government expected all state security officials to be on duty on Christmas Eve and through the holiday week.
As anti-CAA protests continued to roil Kerala yesterday, two senior BJP leaders V Muraleedharan, India’s Minister of State for External Affairs, and Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddiyurappa were shown black flags by students.
Hundreds of people, under the banner of Muslim Coordination Committee, took out a protest march to the Raj Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram, the official residence of the state governor.
Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi were stopped in the afternoon from entering Meerut by Uttar Pradesh police when they were on their way to meet the families of those killed in violence.
Anti-CAA protesters gathered near Mandi House in central Delhi defying Section 144 which restricts the gathering of more than four people ahead of a planned protest march to Jantar Mantar.
In Kolkata, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee led her fourth street march from Swami Vivekanada statue at Bidhan Sarani in north Kolkata to Gandhi Bhawan in Beleghata in eastern part of the city.
On the other hand, BJP leader and former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis led a pro-CAA rally in West Bengal’s Siliguri.
Shouting slogans against CAA and waving black flags, students of Jadavpur University yesterday blocked its Chancellor and West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar’s entry into the campus for the annual convocation, prompting him to return and later denounce the incident as “total collapse of rule of law”.
A note of dissent on CAA came from West Bengal BJP leader Chandra Kumar Bose, a great grand nephew of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Chandra posted tweets questioning the law. India is a country “open to all religions and communities”, said Bose.
Rabeeha Abdurehim, a student of the Pondicherry University who did her Masters course in Mass Communication, refused to accept the gold medal to express solidarity with students protesting against CAA.
Jakob Lindenthal, a German post-graduate student of Physics at Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, was reportedly ordered to return home after he took part in street protests against CAA and NRC. He reportedly left for Amseterdam on Monday.
In Assam’s Dibrugarh town, thousands turned up at a protest organized by All Assam Students Union against CAA.