The NPR is a list of usual residents of the country. A usual resident is 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.
Amid countrywide protest over the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Odisha government plans to start the process of updating the National Population Register (NPR) as well as houselisting from April 16, a senior census official said Tuesday.
“Beginning from April 16, we are going to do NPR and houselisting for 45 days in which our enumerators would go to each of the houses with a questionnaire for updating the 2010 NPR. More than 1 lakh enumerators, most of them teachers, would fill up 14 fields. However, some fields have been rephrased and additional information has been sought in some specific field,” said the census official, requesting anonymity.
The NPR is a list of usual residents of the country. A usual resident is 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.
Officials said in 2010 NPR, enumerators had asked people to name their father, mother and spouse in full and if they were alive or not. But in 2020 NPR, the government wants people to give date and place of birth of their parents and specific place if born outside country. This time, people will also be asked to name their mother tongue. Unlike 2010, when the NPR was last updated, every person in 2020 would have to give Aadhaar number, mobile phone number, voter ID and driving license.
On Monday, BJD Rajya Sabha MP Sasmit Patra said his party supported CAA, but not NRC. On NPR, Patra said it was a routine administrative matter. “It was already done in 2010 and is being updated now as per the process laid down,” he said.
For the NPR process, the state government has already appointed district collectors as principal census officers except in Cuttack, Berhampur, Bhubaneswar, Sambalpur and Rourkela Municipal Corporation areas. The additional district magistrates will be district census officers while deputy collectors have been appointed as deputy district census officers.
Census officials said the pilot exercise of NPR has alrady been carried out in Pattamundai block of Kendrapara district, Bhubaneswar in Khurda and Puintala in Balangir district in August. 2020.
The NPR exercise has touched a raw nerve in West Bengal and Bihar. In Bengal, the government suspended the groundwork for the exercise last month. In Bihar, deputy chief minister and BJP leader Sushil Modi announced last Friday that the NPR exercise would begin from May 15. It drew a sharp reaction from ally JD (U)’s general secretary Pavan Varma who wrote to chief minister Nitish Kumar asking him to scrap it saying that NPR was the first step to implementing the NRC which Kumar had said that Bihar will not implement.
Prasanta Patnaik