Tag: aadhaar NPR

Will the CAA Rules Unravel a ‘Chronology’ That Lets Loose an NRC-NPR?

A Union government that is truly representative of all Indians will, from the Assam experience, understand this problem. An unaccountable regime may not.

Citizens activism through the Right to Information Act (RTI) has revealed how a giant step towards National Population Register (NPR) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) has been possibly taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) when the Aadhaar database was linked with the NPR database in 2015. The creation of an NPR database began first in 2010 and was abandoned thereafter due to difficulties.

While the only legal way of linking the two databases is by acquiring informed consent from every resident through an exercise similar to the Census, which means through a public exercise conducted by the Registrar General of India (RGI), the process appears to have happened without any informed consent.

There is yet another angle or twist.

In 2020, at the height of the nationwide agitation against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), NPR and NRC, the union government had announced that the Census (now not conducted since 2011 and which was statutorily due in 2021) will also be conducted with the NPR simultaneously.

There was an outcry of protest against this move as several state governments called for a boycott against answering questions pertaining to NPR in the Census form. Four specific questions were included in the Census form related to the NPR-NRC. For instance, information related to parents’ places and dates of birth were sought.These are not answers that Census data ever seeks.

Pushed into a corner by several unaffiliated state governments, the home ministry was compelled to admit that answering questions in the NPR is purely voluntary while under the Census Act, 1948, there is a legal obligation to answer all the questions put every ten years.

The Census process is oral and conducted by designated officers of the RGI without any document that takes or asks for signatures. The census data collection, house-listing and household data collection is crucial for understanding demographics and formulation of policies.

In contrast, the enumeration for the NPR can only be conducted under the provisions of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 which in fact goes beyond the amended Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, 1955 (amended in 2004) and is therefore arguably ultra vires of the act itself; Section 14A of the amended Citizenship Act, 1955 (amendment in 2004) simply states that the government “may compulsorily register every citizen as a citizen of India and issue a national identity card to him”. It is the rules that ascribe the process of NPR enumeration not the act. Both Section 14A and the rules are currently under challenged in the Supreme Court.

Given this background to the manner in which the Union government has been reluctant to share information publicly, also given its doubtful credentials over data collection and maintenance of data integrity, 2023 brought another surprise.

Also read: Rules Under CAA Now Ready, Likely to Be Notified Before 2024 Elections: Reports

The Annual Report 2021-22 of MHA declared that crucial personal data – that can only be collected through a rigorous door-to-door enumeration process by officials under the RGI and which includes name, gender, date and place of birth, place of residence, father’s and mother’s name was (already) collected, albeit in a secretive manner, by seeding Aadhaar, mobile numbers and ration card details. A series of RTIs has led us to conclude that the exercise was conducted without the informed consent of Indians. A further scrutiny of home ministry reports of 2010, 2015-2016 and 2020 raises more questions.

The scale of NPR-Aadhaar linkage

How many of the NPR updated records contain details from the Aadhaar card and have the Aadhaar number?

While the 2020 NPR manual mentions that Aadhaar numbers in the NPR booklet came from the 2015-2016 exercise of “updating the NPR”, the RGI is silent on this and repeated efforts to seek replies from the RGI under the RTI have not helped clarify the exact scale of the linkage.

The 2014-15 annual report of the home ministry mentioned that the “data digitisation process has been completed” and a database of “119.19 crore persons created.” The 2017-18 annual report of the ministry contradicts this and underlines “demographic data of 119.95 crore persons was collected in 2010 and has been updated during 2015- 16 in all States/UTs except Assam and Meghalaya”.

While there are several annual reports of MHA that give a count of the NPR records linked with Aadhaar numbers, those reports correspond to the period before the updating exercise of 2015-16. The annual report of 2014-15 states that the NPR data of more than 23.51 crore persons has been set to UIDAI for duplication and generation of Aaadhaar number, of which UIDAI generated 19.67 crore Aadhaar numbers, which is in turn a quarter of the 80.46 crore Aadhaar database generated by UIDAI.

While there are several annual reports of MHA that give a count of the NPR records linked with Aadhaar numbers, those reports correspond to the period before the updating exercise of 2015-16. The annual report of 2014-15 states that the NPR data of more than 23.51 crore persons has been sent to UIDAI for duplication — this means seeding of data collected for purposes for proof of residence, Aadhaar — and generation of Aaadhaar number being used as base data for the NPR. From this 23.51 crore strong data of Aadhaar records UIDAI generated 19.67 crore Aadhaar numbers, which is in turn a quarter of the 80.46 crore Aadhaar database generated by UIDAI.

This number could only have grown after the 2015-16 exercise, which was intended to be a giant leap for the scale of linkage. The official records are clear that the leap did take place but unclear on the scale or implications.

Is the NPR-Aadhaar linkage illegal?

The NPR database is distinct from the Aadhaar database. The former draws strength from the amended section 14A of the Citizenship Act, that provides for the possibility of a National Identity Card for Citizens (rules outline the NPR as the procedure to achieve this).

The Aadhaar card is simply a proof of residence, with biometric data collection to enable access to government schemes etc. The legal provision for Aadhaar came through the Aadhaar Act of 2016, which made informed consent of the holder of the Aadhaar number mandatory for its use for any specific purpose. After the 2018 judgement in the Aadhaar case limiting its proliferation (that struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act that enabled private entities to use Aadhaar data for services), serious issues of policy incursions into privacy have also been flagged.

The issue is complex. In 2010, an exercise thereafter amended, demographic information for the NPR were collected through a door-to-door enumeration process conducted by RGI, on the basis of a signed form; thereafter this exercise was abandoned. The Aadhaar number was assigned by the UIDAI authorities after the collection of biometric data including photographs, ten fingerprints and IRIS prints. The Aadhaar number is supposed to be the link between the records of one person in the two databases.

However, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003 did not provide for the linking of databases controlled by two different agencies. The data for Aadhaar had actually been collected by various private agencies through camps, and not through any door-to-door visit by enumerators engaged by RGI. The wholesale linkage that happened till 2015, without specific consent of any of the Aadhaar number holders, was not backed by that law or any other law. Thus, the legitimacy of NPR – as of 2015 – is highly questionable.

Besides, the very purpose of NPR has been to establish residency (and then citizenship) on the basis of documentation, shifting the burden of proof on an individual that will then expose himself to the tyranny of a local bureaucracy controlled by governments. Absence or anomalies in these documents will lead to arbitrary exclusions from the “ordinary residents” (citizenship list) causing untold hardships and social upheavals. As the lived current experience of the state of Assam reveals. The exercise is not just fundamentally unfair, the ultra vires process exposes the defenceless individual to the judgment of local authorities.

In December 2019, the passage of the religion biased Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) caused outrage. Assertions by senior functionaries of the present union government that the implementation of the CAA-NPR-NRC would “follow a chronology” led to legitimate fears that this was the aggressive first step to use the tyranny of a bureaucratic document test to exclude hundreds of thousands of disempowered and marginalised Indians from their citizenship. Now fears of this “chronology” being set in motion any day may be realised as the CAA Rules (pending since 2019 when the Act was passed) are underway.

Assam has spent Rs 1,700 crore from the public exchequer on an excruciating exercise that has burdened not just the state but a third plus of the 3.3 crore population. At least 1.3 crore Assam’s citizens are in one way or another affected by the citizenship crisis. Arbitrary exclusions have been marked by baseless “notices” being sent by the Assam Border Police and Foreigner Tribunals (adjudicating bodies controlled by the state executive) and while a significant 2,22,000 citizens and their families reel under the burden of either being excluded from the NRC or being declared “suspected foreigners” or “D” Voters, our experience on the ground shows that 99% or more are “genuine’ Indians.

Also read: Here’s Why the BJP Brings up the CAA – But Stops Short of Implementing it – in Bengal

The linkage of NPR with the Aadhaar database, without informed consent and in a hasty and secretive manner, creates further possibility of anomalies and mismatch in documents Added to this, the the proviso, contained in the 2003 Rules that shift the burden of proof on individuals to “prove” citizenship is a recipe made for large-scale social disaster and a humanitarian crisis.

It was this belated realisation that had most likely led the MHA to abandon the pilot project begun earlier (obliquely referred to MHA annual report 2008-09). The complication referred to here is the lack of documentation of genuine citizens in this country, and also the imbalance of the power equation between the common man and the local face of the government. The same complications apply equally to genuine residents.

A union government that is truly representative of all Indians will, from the Assam experience, understand this problem. An unaccountable regime may not.

A collective citizens’ investigation by Metiabruz Kolkatta in close collaborators with Citizens for Justice and Peace. 

Teesta Seetalvad is a senior journalist and secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace.  

Love in the Time of Conflict: The Making of India’s First Forum for Interfaith Arts and Dialogue

The creator and curator of India’s first ever forum for interfaith art and dialogue reflects on the vision, inspirations, challenges, and lessons from the recent three-day event in Mumbai.

Those at the opening ceremony of In Sync: India’s first forum for Interfaith Arts and Dialogue earlier this month saw a rather frazzled emcee, bumbling her way through the script. Witnesses included chief guest, the actor Sushant Singh and Father Magi Murzello, rector of St. Andrew’s College of Arts, Science and Commerce, besides 40-odd audience members. 

Many would not have known in those awkward initial moments that the emcee was also the creator, curator, researcher, writer, designer, marketer, project coordinator, and producer of the event. They would not have known the absolute chaos of the last few weeks

Lesson: Do not bite off more than you can chew. 

I had bitten off so much that even five more sets of teeth and tongue would have fallen short at that moment. For almost four years, I had been laying the groundwork for what would become India’s (and possibly the world’s) first-ever forum for interfaith arts and dialogue. A lot was at stake. In Sync was coming to life, and like any first-time mother, I was a nervous wreck.  

Inaugural session with Urmi Chanda, Sushant Singh, Fr. Magi Murzello and Dr. Omkar Bhatkar. Photo: Pushkraj Shirke

Back to the beginning

It was the fall of 2019. I had just started my professional doctorate programme in Interfaith Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in theUK. A month in, I was feeling the bite of not just the Welsh winter but also homesickness. It was my first time out of India, and that too in a small university town with nearly no other brown faces. 

But the true extent of homesickness hit me when protests against the government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) developed into a vivid fullness across India. 

From a distance, I watched a people’s movement take shape, unlike anything I had witnessed before. I alternately felt indignation at the state, and admiration for her people for upholding some of the most sacred values of democracy. 

As an interfaith research scholar, I was more struck by the solidarities that were blossoming on the streets of Shaheen Bagh and a thousand other galis and nukkads (bylanes and crossroads) across India. 

I had never seen such a public show of support from Hindus and other faith communities towards Muslim citizens, who are otherwise recipients of prejudice and hatred, and indeed the most vulnerable in the face of the discriminatory CAA, NRC and NPR. 

My heart swelled as I saw people sing Hum dekhenge (the Faiz Ahmed Faiz composition that acquired an anthem-like significance during the anti-CAA-NRC protests), draw heartwarming graffiti, and even hold interfaith prayer services at the protest sites. It was electrifying to witness such unity and to know that India’s citizens were still capable of such compassion despite the best divisive efforts of majoritarian forces. 

Lesson: There is still hope. There is always hope, as long as there are beating human hearts. 

I wanted so badly to be in my homeland, to be a part of the history being created in those months. To my emotionally-charged head, the stoic Western paradigms of theology-based interfaith engagement seemed dull, because back home, faith communities were engaging in ways that were so, so different. 

From seed to sapling

I returned home soon enough, forced to stay on by the Covid-19 pandemic. It affected not just the anti-CAA-NRC-NPR protests but life as we knew it. While working on my doctoral thesis, I tried to invent a model of interfaith engagement that would speak to not just the people of India, but all of South Asia. 

By 2023, life had resumed a certain normalcy and the ruling dispensation was back to deploying its propagandist media and fake-news machinery to stir up communal rift at any given opportunity. As a journalist, I had written for years about what was wrong. This time, I was determined to do something about it. 

The prevalent majoritarian politics necessitated the need to work towards interfaith harmony. I drew strength from the memory of the anti-CAA-NRC protest movement, when the power of the people coursed through the streets of India. 

The recent public response to the Bharat Jodo Yatra (‘march to unite India’), helmed by opposition politician Rahul Gandhi, confirmed my belief that most Indians knew and wanted peace between communities. Perhaps they only needed a little help with how to achieve it. 

My parallel career in peacework gave me the framework and the tools, and I decided to lean into our legacy of syncretic culture. Syncretism is the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought. My doctoral work was essentially to formulate a theoretical model using syncretic art as the catalyst, the starting point of interfaith dialogue. 

Since India’s biggest religious community, the Hindus, have little theological common ground with her other biggest minorities, Muslims and Christians, I deduced that standard (read: Western) theology-oriented interfaith dialogue models with faith leaders at the helm would not work. 

It was the citizens most affected by continual communal conflict who needed to lead and participate in such dialogue. After all, faith is not the sole preserve of faith leaders. For a deeply religious subcontinental population, faith is an important aspect of our identities. 

We needed to find places and opportunities to come together not just to celebrate commonalities, but also work through our differences. And what better way to do this than to partake in centuries of collective culture and art? I would remind people of what they already knew, build upon our pluralities, and marry it with peacebuilding.

Syncing it all together

The idea of In Sync emerged while wanting to move from theory to praxis. I envisioned a forum at the centre of which would be a pop-up exhibition of knowledge panels on some of India’s syncretic art forms. These art forms – with clear resonances of Hindu, Muslim, and other cultures – would become the basis of mutual appreciation and an entry point into deeper dialogue about communal matters that plague us. 

Dialogue would be the peacebuilding tool of choice, with a trained facilitator leading the sessions between participants of different faith communities. This model would be replicable and applicable to different contexts, and easy to set up. In Sync was created as an experimental container, a physical (or virtual!) space where people could contend with the sociocultural ailment of communal tension festering for centuries. 

Pop-up exhibition. Photo: Pushkraj Shirke

For almost two years, I walked around with the concept note, pitching to likely individuals and organisations. With no precedents, it was hard to explain, and rejections flew thick and fast. But I continued to work in the interfaith space, learning, building capacity and credibility, pitching whenever I spotted a likely partner. 

The first breakthrough happened less than a couple of months ago when my university gave me a microgrant towards completing what was essentially a part of my doctoral work. That is all I needed to make that leap of faith. I jumped in with the kind of resolve that appears foolhardy in retrospect. But I was quickly able to garner more partnerships and sponsorships, like pieces of a magical puzzle falling into place. 

Lesson: Ask (and keep asking) and you shall receive. 

The step of many firsts

As supporters and the production funds came together, the vision grew. For its inaugural edition, I was able to offer real-life performances of some of those syncretic arts that my knowledge panels spoke about. 

Day one comprised a kathak performance by Sanjukta Wagh that spelt out the many instances of syncretism embodied in the classical dance form. It was unusual but not shocking to see a Shiva Stotram and a Begum Akhtar song in the span of one performance. This was followed by the first of three interfaith dialogue sessions. The first and last ones were led by leadership coach and trained dialogue facilitator, Rukmini Iyer. 

Day two comprised a talk titled ‘Mary in a Saree’ on the Indo-Christian art of Angelo da Fonseca by Dr Omkar Bhatkar, co-founder and director of the St. Andrew’s Centre for Philosophy and Performing Arts, the event’s venue partner. 

Mythologist and author Utkarsh Patel made a presentation titled ‘Many Myths, One People’, on syncretic myths and folk narratives. His talk included the legends of Bon Bibi and Dakkhin Rai, the striking Islamic influences on Mapilla Ramayana, and the tale of Bibi Nacharamma, the Muslim consort of Lord Venkateshwara. 

‘Poets for Peace’, featuring (L-R) Geet Sagar, Kiran Bhat, Tripurari, Sukanya Purkayastha and Anthrix J. Photo: Pushkraj Shirke

There was also a session introducing interfaith harmony for teenagers, led by facilitator Rhea Dsouza, and some ‘Poets for Peace’ who presented poetry and music from the past and present that showcase India’s syncretic spirit. Poets Kiran Bhat, Tripurari, and Geet Sagar ‘Awaazz’ recited their original works in Hindi, English, Kannada and Maithili, while singer Sukanya Purkayastha presented a poem by Bulleh Shah, followed by the hit Bollywood song Yeh taara woh taara. 

On day three, music facilitators Mayuree Pandit and Leslie Nazareth, accompanied by educator Romana Shaikh led the ‘Chants for Harmony’ session, where participants engaged in multi-faith chanting as a group. Then followed a performance titled ‘Whirling Mandala’ by dancer and sacred arts practitioner, Zia Nath, inspired by the Sufis and the ghoomar tradition of Rajasthan. 

All three evenings saw a full house with many visitors leaving encouraging feedback about the diversity of performances and thought-provoking ideas. The dialogue sessions, which were meant to be the central offering of the forum, received less attention.

Lesson: Entertainment is easy; introspection much harder. 

Creating any paradigm shift takes effort and consistency. I don’t know how long I will be able to persevere on this path given the political climate, or whether this event will yield any enduring results. What I know for sure is the value of love as the guiding principle of any endeavour. What is offered with love is received with love. 

This upholds what Sant Kabir said centuries ago:            

Pothi padh padh jag muaa, pandit bhayaa na koye,
Dhai aakhar prem kaa, Padhe so pandit hoye ||

(Reading scripture or books does not a scholar make
A truly learned one is he, who some words of love spake)

Urmi Chanda is an interfaith researcher, culture writer, and peacebuilder based in Mumbai, India.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature. 

Exclusive: In Meeting Last October, MHA Sought Mandatory Collection of Aadhaar Details During NPR

File notings accessed by The Wire show that the government was even prepared to amend the Citizenship Act in order to ensure compliance, a plan that was dropped when officials said they already had the power.

New Delhi: Amidst the ongoing controversy over the collection of Aadhaar numbers during the process of updating the National Population Register (NPR), the Union home ministry on Thursday insisted the  government would not force people to submit their Aadhaar credentials to official enumerators.

However, official documents show that the ministry wanted mandatory collection of Aadhaar numbers to be an essential part of the NPR exercise. Official ministry files, copies of which are with The Wire, show that the Centre was so insistent on mandatory collection that it was even prepared to amend the Citizenship Act if needed in order to be able to legally ensure compliance from residents.

In the event, overruling the advice of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the MHA asserted that the government was already empowered to mandatorily collect Aadhaar details.

Also read: Official File Notings on NPR and Aadhaar Contradict Home Ministry Assurances

On July 19, 2019, the office of the Registrar General of India (ORGI) under the Union home ministry – the nodal government department for implementing the NPR –  wrote to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) seeking permission to collect Aadhaar numbers during the forthcoming NPR updating exercise. The reason the ORGI sought a go-ahead from MeitY was because it felt the Supreme Court ruling on Aadhaar and privacy, and the passage of the Aadhar and Other Laws (Amendment) Act, 2019, had created some ambiguity.

The ORGI marked its letter to the secretary, MeitY and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which authorises Aadhaar. The matter was followed up at a meeting led by S.Gopalakrishnan, joint secretary, MeitY, on August 6, 2019.

According to the minutes of this meeting, a copy of which is with The Wire, it was decided that the ORGI could collect Aadhaar numbers during the “NPR updation” without violating the conditions stipulated in “Clause 5” of the Aadhaar regulations, 2016.

Clause 5 says that if agency collects Aadhaar numbers then it has to clearly tell the Aadhaar holder the reason for doing so. At the same time, it has to explain to the Aadhaar holder whether sharing the Aadhaar number is compulsory or not. Apart from these, the agency has to also seek consent from the person who is sharing her Aadhaar number.

The clause also says that the agency can use the Aadhaar numbers only for the purposes it has sought consent for. The ORGI was given permission to collect Aadhaar numbers under these conditions.

In response, additional registrar general Sanjay wrote on August 23, 2019 that the ORGI was only collecting Aadhaar as an alternative and to certify those numbers which have already been collected during the 2015 NPR updating exercise.

Within two months, however, the ORGI changed its stance later, arguing that MeitY’s conditions under Clause 5 were not applicable to it since it is a government organisation.

Speaking about the MeitY-imposed conditions, the ORGI wrote on October 12, 2019, “From this [i.e. Clause 5], it appears that ORGI could collect Aadhaar number as part of the NPR on Voluntary basis only. However, the above advice does not seem to be applicable to ORGI, which is a Government Organisation.”

The government from here on decided that the ORGI had the authority to collect Aadhaar numbers mandatorily during the NPR updating exercise to be carried out in 2020, official documents reveal.

The file noting dated October 12, 2019 signed by registrar general Vivek Joshi reads thus: “Provision under 14A(5) of the Citizenship Act, 1955 it is stated that ‘The procedure to be followed in compulsory registration of the citizens of India shall be such as may be prescribed.’ And, therefore, for the purpose of preparation of population register under rule 3(4) of the Citizenship Rules, 2003, we may make collection of Aadhar number mandatory while updating NPR.”

Also read: Like Modi, Trump’s Plan to Count Citizens Raised Fears of Data Misuse

The ORGI also proposed that if current rules do not permit making the collection of Aadhaar numbers mandatory then the Aadhaar Act and Citizenship Act should be amended.

“If otherwise, for the collection of Aadhaar number for NPR updation and also for Civil Registration System (CRS) Scheme for registration of births and deaths of the ORGI may be made mandatory by making suitable amendments in the Aadhaar Act or Citizenship Act,” reads the file noting.

A high-level meeting under the Union home secretary was held on October 18, 2019 in which the collection of Aadhaar details was discussed. Others present at the meeting included the CEO of UIDAI, MeitY secretary, secretary of the department of legal affairs under the Union law ministry, and representatives of the ORGI. There is no information about what the outcome of the meeting was. While the paper trail leading up to the meeting had built a case for the mandatory collection of Aadhaar details, anonymous MHA sources have been quoted in the media claiming that NPR, 2020 will collect Aadhaar numbers only on a ‘voluntary’ basis.

Curiously, one official gave the Times of India a definition of ‘voluntary’ that resembles the word ‘mandatory’: “A senior official explained “voluntary” or “optional” sharing of identification documents only meant respondents would not be required to provide details of Aadhaar, driving licence, voter ID or passport number if these have not been issued to them in the first place.” This means providing Aadhaar details would essentially be mandatory for the 1.2 billion residents who have an Aadhaar card.

The Wire had earlier reported that 60 crore Aadhaar numbers – almost half of the total Aadhar data –  have already been seeded with the NPR database even before the 2020 updating exercise started.

The NPR was initiated in 2010 by the United Progressive Alliance government under then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. A pilot project on NPR started two years earlier, when Shivraj Patil (May 22, 2004 – November 31, 2008) and P. Chidambaram (November 30, 2008 – July 31, 2012) were Union home ministers. Chidambaram has since said that the NPR exercise under the UPA is quite different from and the avatar it has now taken – with attempts to also question respondents about their parents’ place of birth etc.

Law Minister Contradicts Amit Shah, Says NPR Data ‘May or May Not be Used’ for NRC

Ravi Shankar Prasad also sought to reassure people that the amended citizenship act does not relate to Indians.

New Delhi: Union law and justice minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, in an interview to the Indian Express, said that the “entire legal process” will be followed in updating the National Population Register (NPR) and the implementation of a nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC). He also said that there will be consultations with state governments and feedback will be taken. On the documents required for NRC, he said there would be a public declaration after the process starts under Rule 3 and Rule 4 of Citizenship Rules, 2003. He didn’t specify when the NRC process would start.

Prasad’s remarks are significant as many states, including BJP ally JDU in Bihar, have also opposed a nation-wide NRC and at least two states have paused the process of updating the NPR. After protests erupted against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) across the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also claimed that the nationwide NRC isn’t in the works at all.

On the question of NPR data being used for NRC, he said: “some may be used or some may not be used”. This comes days after home minister Amit Shah claimed in an interview to news agency ANI that there is no link between the NPR and NRC. “There is no link between NRC and NPR, I am clearly stating this today,” Shah had said.

Prasad answered many questions regarding the CAA, NRC and NPR. He called the CAA “perfectly constitutional and legal”, citing Article 246 of the Indian Constitution which he says empowers the parliament to “make laws in any of the matters enumerated in List 1 of the seventh schedule, and entry 17 of this list talks about citizenship, naturalisation and aliens”.

Also Read: Opposition Peddling Lies on NRC, CAA, Says Modi, Then Dishes Out His Own Untruths

On being asked if it doesn’t violate fundamental rights guaranteed by Article 14 of the Constitution, he responded by saying that the CAA is not related to any Indian at all as it doesn’t give or take away citizenship from anyone, including Muslims. “…persons who have been persecuted because of faith, in the three countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are being given citizenship in India….These persecuted groups because of the faith form a reasonable group by themselves and this reasonable classification has a nexus with the object of the law,” he said.

Questions have been raised by many legal experts, journalists and opposition parties on the new data points being introduced in the NPR which ask for details of parents and their place of birth, alleging its the first step towards a nationwide NRC. On being questioned on the same, Prasad said that since Census data of individuals can’t be made public to any authority, NPR was needed to frame policies for the delivery of welfare schemes. Curiously, there was no explanation about why the NPR was needed when the Aadhar project intends to do the same thing.

On the fear among Muslims that Hindus who are out of the NRC can use the CAA to become citizens while they would be excluded, he reiterated that the CAA wasn’t applicable to Indians and no Indian could become a citizen or denied citizenship because of the law.

Congress-BJP Spat Over Aim of NPR Reaches Fever Pitch

With the BJP declaring the NPR a Congress project, the grand old party has pointed out that there is a qualitative difference between NPR during UPA’s time and the one the Modi government aims to carry out. 

New Delhi: The Union government’s decision to update the National Population Register (NPR) has triggered an intense political battle over the last few days with the Congress quoting government documents to say the NPR is the first step to implementing the controversial pan-India National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, on the other hand, have hit out at the Sonia Gandhi-led party, noting that the first NPR updating exercise was carried out by the United Progressive Alliance government – in 2010. 

The NPR records personal details of everyone in the country who is a “usual resident”, and the opposition has accused the Modi government of intending to use its data to prepare the NRC – whose stated aim is to drive out “illegal immigrants” from India. 

While the updating of NPR has been carried out twice in the past – once during the UPA period and then   during the first term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – the recent drive to update it comes at a time when there is a nationwide movement against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act and NRC. 

The fear is that a large number of poor people will be unable to provide whatever documentation the government decides is needed to qualify for the NRC and will get labeled ‘doubtful citizens’.

Also read: NPR, NRC Will be More Disastrous Than Demonetisation: Rahul Gandhi

Many opposition parties believe that in the hands of a government like the BJP – which makes no bones about its commitment to Hindutva and the idea of a ‘Hindu rashtra’ – the NPR-NRC-CAA exercise could end up disproportionately targeting Muslims in India

As the clamour over the NPR grew, the saffron party released a video from 2010 that showed the then home minister P. Chidambaram launching the NPR, where he had said that an exercise like this has not been initiated anywhere in the world. 

Union minister Prakash Javadekar, while attacking the Congress, said that the updating exercise being unrolled is simply a continuation of what the UPA government had started. 

The BJP’s IT cell head Amit Malaviya tweeted in support of the statement, even as BJP leaders emphasised that NPR is not linked to the NRC. Subsequently, a bunch of BJP leaders called Rahul Gandhi, former president of the party who has been campaigning against NPR and NRC, a “liar”.

The BJP maintained that NPR will be updated only to streamline provision of welfare schemes. 

However, the Congress pointed out that there is a qualitative difference between the NPR during the UPA time and the one the Modi government aims to carry out. 

Chidambaram said that the emphasis of the NPR in 2010 by the UPA government was on “residency” and not “citizenship”. 

“We were enumerating the ‘usual residents’ of the country. The emphasis is on residency not citizenship,” The NPR was to aid the preparation of the 2011 census. Every usual resident was to be enumerated irrespective of his or her religion or place of birth, he said. 

Also read: If Ten More State Governments Oppose NPR, It Will be Buried: Prakash Karat

He asserted that the Modi government’s updating of NPR would be carried out under the 2003 Citizenship At rules, and not the Census Act, as was done during the UPA government.

He further said that the UPA government did not mention the NRC at all while updating the NPR in 2010, while the Modi government’s own documents categorically make links between the NPR and NRC. For example, the Annual Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs, 2019, notes,

“The National Population Register (NPR) is the first step towards the creation of the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) under the provisions of the aforementioned Statute.”

Every “usual resident” was to be enumerated (during the UPA time) without reference to citizenship, he said.

Congress leader Ajay Maken too charged back at the BJP. He said that the first NPR exercise was started in 2003 during the NDA-I government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He said that only 31 lakh people in 12 states and a Union territory were picked for the NPR pilot project. He added that when the UPA came to power, the project was still under consideration. It was stopped later on the advice of a committee of secretaries, he said.  

NPR data was shelved during the UPA in favour of Aadhaar, which practically catalogued the same details of Indian residents.  

Also read: ‘NPR, NRC Are Two Sides of the Same Coin’: M.K. Stalin

Maken reiterated Chidambaram’s arguments and said that the enumeration of usual residents in the NPR during the UPA had no links with NRC. “I am saying again and again that following the NRC is a second step, which we never intended to take,” he said. The 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act said that the government “may” compulsorily register all citizens. “We never converted that into ‘shall’ and we will never convert it into ‘shall’ because we know the complexities,” he added.

While both parties have stuck to their positions, the NPR, in reality, was conceptualised because of a fear of illegal immigrants. The NDA-I government felt that ‘Pakistani infiltrators’ – not undocumented migrants but militants – may have entered Indian territory after the Kargil war. A similar fear crept into the UPA machinery after the 26/11 terrorist attack on Mumbai, following which the government started talking about NPR. However, Aadhaar was subsequently favoured over NPR. 

The Modi government revived the NPR idea by linking it to the NRC, which has been right at the top of its political agenda. The Congress has never spoken about a NRC-like process, except in Assam. 

With the CAA now in place, there is an added fear that the NPR-NRC can become an instrument not just to identify undocumented migrants but also to persecute religious minorities and other marginalised sections in India. That is why NPR in the current context is more problematic than its precedents.

NPR, NRC Will be More Disastrous Than Demonetisation: Rahul Gandhi

“The basic idea of these exercises is to ask all poor people whether they are Indian or not,” said Gandhi.

Attacking the government over the issue of the National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said these exercises will be more disastrous than the note ban in November 2016.

The basic idea of these exercises is to ask all poor people whether they are Indian or not, he told reporters on the sidelines of the flag-hoisting ceremony at the AICC headquarters here on the occasion of 135th foundation day of the party.

Also read: Opposition Peddling Lies on NRC, CAA, Says Modi, Then Dishes Out His Own Untruths

“His (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) 15 friends will not have to show any document and the money generated will go into the pockets if those 15 people,” he said, referring to his allegation that the government was working for the benefit of “15 crony capitalists”.

“This will be more disastrous for people than demonetisation. This will have twice the impact of demonetisation,” he said.

Digital India on Steroids: How Aadhaar Infra Enables the NPR and the NRC

The NPR is the ‘mother’ database for a potential NRC, but it needs verification of biometrics from the UIDAI.

Protests have broken out across the country over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). While there is a more recent history to why the NRC was updated over the last four years in Assam, there is a complicated past of war and migration has fuelled the BJP’s call for it all over the country. 

But to know the story of the National Population Register, how Aadhaar infrastructure underpins it, and how it relates to the National Register of Indian Citizens, we need to first start with Kargil. 

The Pakistan Army’s intrusion into Indian territory took the government by surprise. Of particular concern was infiltration by Pakistanis who came dressed up in civilian clothes. A ‘Kargil review’ committee was appointed by the-then Vajpayee government to suggest possible solutions, one of which was to issue national ID cards to people who live in border areas and then scale that up to the whole country. 

Eventually, there were proposals for a ‘Multi Purpose National Identity Cards’ (MNIC) project and a ‘National Population Register’ (NPR), both instituted under provisions of the Citizenship Act of 1955. 

The MNIC proposal was presented to all the chief ministers in a conference on internal security on 17th November 2001 and was accepted. 

A 2002 parliamentary question about the identity cards in Lok Sabha had the following answer from the then Minister of State for Home Affairs Shri Ch. Vidyasagar Rao: 

“The issue of MNICs would involve creation of an identification system for more than one billion citizens, streamlining the existing machinery for the registration of birth and deaths at the grass root level and choices of institutional as well as technological options for the creation of an integrated data base of personal identities capable of being continuously updated. The Government would finalise its decision only after an in-depth examination of all relevant issues and after making necessary preparations, including the legal backing to the scheme.”

This was the birth of Aadhaar if you ask the current BJP, which stakes claim to it as their own project proposed under Vajpayee after the Kargil war.

Indeed, the Multi Purpose National Identity Card was not much different from Aadhaar. It was supposed to be a smart card which would store the fingerprints of individuals and other data in the card. The card was based on the ‘Smart Card Operating System for Transport Application’ (SCOSTA) standard developed by National Informatics Center for blocking illegal driver licences using a chip-card based on equivalent ISO standards. 

Also read: Why the Aadhaar Act’s Future Isn’t Set in Stone Yet

While the technical standards where being formulated the Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI), under home ministry started working out the modalities to build this database. In 2003, much before Aadhaar was announced, the RGI decided to use fingerprints of individuals as part of the data collection required for MNIC and the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC). 

Importantly, a RGI newsletter from 2003 does not distinguish between the MNIC and NRIC, referring to them as vital cogs of the same system. 

The newsletter also notes the framing of ‘The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003’. These rules call for the creation of a ‘population register’ that would feed into the national ID card system (MNIC) and the National Register of Indian Citizens.

Another RGI newsletter from that time the following also points out: 

“The Government has decided to conduct a pilot for the MNIC Project in selected areas of 13 districts in thirteen states/union territories in the country. The pilot aims at providing the following benefits:

a) A credible individual identification system

b) Speedy and efficient transactions between the individual and the service provider (government and non-government)

c) User friendly interface between the citizen and the government

d) Improvement in services to the people in ‘Below Poverty Line’ (BPL) or ‘Above Poverty Line’ (APL) categories

e) Deterrent for future illegal immigration. ” [Emphasis added by The Wire]

While these pilot studies and exercises where being carried out, India was hit by another terrorist attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2008. The terrorists came to India posing as fishermen in a fishing trawler and attacked key places in Mumbai. The Mumbai attacks were a new kind of warfare for India, which opened up coastal waters as threat vector. The incident questioned India’s failures in surveillance & intelligence and the failure of coast guard in stopping illegal entry of people via fishing trawlers. 

To respond to these challenges, the UPA government started creating new intelligence databases like NATGRID, started registration and licensing of fishing vessels and created a database for it called ReALCraft. We also increased the number of coastal police stations and the police were tasked to know everyone living in surroundings.

More importantly, that’s when MNIC cards started to be distributed to fishermen.

India eventually issued a gazette notification to start the ‘National Population Register’ (NPR) on March 15, 2010. The idea was to create a database of all ‘usual residents’ and use that to eventually feed into a National Register of Indian Citizens (NIRC).

Aadhaar versus NPR

While the MNIC project was ongoing, its progress was sluggish and after a decade, it became clear that it wasn’t progressing well. This is when, under the Planning Commission and Nandan Nilekani, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was formed and the operating procedures were completely changed. Under UIDAI, ‘smart cards’ became bad and central databases to de-duplicate people became the preferred choice of poison. UIDAI formulated rules for the capture of biometrics and iris scans, which went onto become national standards. 

By the time UIDAI standards were formulated, the NPR was already being carried out by the Registrar General of India. The infrastructure for NPR at this stage was old and different from Aadhaar, as it was using smart cards. Electronics Corporation of India Limited, which manufactures our voting machines manufactured machine readers to read smart cards for coastal police stations. But NPR was not yet collecting iris scans and was not de-duplicating data — this data was later collected and added again.

By the time UIDAI standards were formulated, the NPR was already being carried out by the Registrar General of India. Representative image. Photo: Reuters/Mansi Thapliyal

The NPR database was always the root database though and was built to eventually identify citizens. The problem was that it didn’t have the algorithms to compare and find duplicate fingerprints. The cost of storing fingerprints in multiple databases — UIDAI *and* NPR — along with the security of it was also high. 

De-duplication exercises would have been possible only if all the data was in a large single database. 

So, the RGI signed an agreement with UIDAI to share biometric data for de-duplication and issuing Aadhaar. In 2016, it was reported that RGI had shared biometrics captured by it of nearly 300 million people with the Aadhaar agency.

MNIC cards were stopped, but the RGI continued to update National Population Register with Census 2011. 

The problem started when the differences between NPR and UIDAI became apparent — both were ostensibly designed to build a database that would help the government provide welfare services. But they always had different origins. Nilekani for instance brought in the private sector to implement the UIDAI project at breakneck speed, which created enrolment fraud. The home ministry, naturally, had concerns about private operators handing out Aadhaar numbers without any checks. The UIDAI didn’t care too much about this because Aadhaar was legally allowed to be given to any resident, foreign or Indian. 

The MNIC along with NPR, on the other hand, was effectively designed to eventually check citizenship status. 

The problems being created from Aadhaar led to a confrontation between the Home Ministry and UIDAI —  to the point where Chidambaram as Home Minister wanted greater control for NPR as verification is done for the project. 

Committees were created to co-ordinate between NPR & UID. The escalations only stopped after the cabinet committee on UID under Manmohan Singh intervened in January 2012, deciding coastal areas will be covered by NPR and UIDAI will continue to carry out inner states.

Things continued like this until the Supreme Court ordered UIDAI can’t share back the biometrics it collected to anyone. This made things complicated for Registrar General, who asserted the Citizenship Act 1955 gives them the right to collect biometrics (point 8 in MoM). The home ministry ministry sought legal opinion from the attorney general. The RGI updated the National Population Register again in 2015 by going door to door and also collected Aadhaar number of individuals (point 8 in MoM). 

It has since then still needed the biometrics to finish the NPR, and recent reports indicate that this deadlock will be broken.

KYR +

The issue of sharing data between entities was always complicated. In the case of Aadhaar, private registrars under UIDAI had access to data while state governments did not. 

Also read: Why the CAA Is More Lethal Than a Projected NRC

Under the National Population Register, it was the state government and state census offices carrying out the exercises had access to data. Like the Centre,  states also had their own welfare projects and required data on residents of the state. But the data UIDAI was collecting wasn’t enough for states, they needed data specific to their schemes.

In states that had not carried out proper NPR enrolment (inner states), the governments used UIDAI to create ‘State Resident Data Hubs’ to create their own mini Aadhaar and the concept of Know Your Resident Plus (KYR+) was born. This meant states could collect more data like Voter ids on top of basic demographic data (KYC) that UIDAI collected. Often states collected sensitive information like religion and caste details to understand the socio-economic upliftment of various social groups. 

Eventually, states started collecting much more data using their own surveys like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. 

Telangana which first started these special state surveys, did an intensive household survey of the entire state in a single day. A holiday was declared right after formation of Telangana on August 19, 2014, and people were asked to be home with all their identity documents. They were asked to go back to their permanent residences, special buses were arranged and there was a lot of frenzy that was whipped up. If they weren’t in this survey, they may not be eligible for jobs or government benefits. Unlike the Census, which is carried out to know where the population lives, this exercise was done to know where the population is from. Telangana used this data to build a 360 degree profile databases of everyone in the state. During the Supreme Court hearing on Aadhaar, the judges were informed these databases where shut down. Surprisingly the 2018-19 economic survey (Chapter 4, box-5) praises Telangana for creating this secret database which no one from the state heard about. The economic survey recommends Aadhaar be used to link all databases. 

The KYR plus data was being shared among various government departments without any consent. A lot of this data was leaking from government portals and UIDAI would ignore them by stating that no data has been leaking from the central database, the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR). This issue extended to the NPR project as well. 

The NPR now is going to be carried out using a mobile application like Andhra Pradesh and will be linked to Aadhaar as per latest statements and is going to be part of the Census 2021. 

In the end, one can easily say the National Population Register is different from the National Register of Citizens. What then is the relationship between both?  In response to a question in the Lok Sabha on April  21,2015, the-then Minister of State for Home Affairs, Shri Haribhai Parathibhai Chaudhary, clearly spelled it out:

“The National Population Register (NPR) is a Register of Usual Residents. It would contain citizens as well as non-citizens. The objective of creating a NPR is to net all usual residents of the country at a given point of time. This would serve as the mother database for creating the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) by verifying the citizenship status of each and every resident.”

The government already has so much information about us – it just so happens they are in different databases. The mother database for National Register of Indian Citizens is the National Population Register, which in turn uses data from the Aadhaar database. The Supreme Court judgment on Aadhaar only restricts UIDAI from sharing biometrics and does not put any restrictions on sharing of demographic data. In fact, under the national security clauses a lot of this can be allowed.

The government’s use of data to identify people and randomly create registries has created a multitude of problems.  It is time they be put in check with the upcoming data protection bill. 

Srinivas Kodali is an independent researcher working on data, internet and governance.