The National Population Register (NPR) will likely be asking for information on citizens’ mother tongues to update the citizens' database from April. According to a report by The Indian Express, the mother tongue of citizens will be added to the data along with the house-listing exercise for the Census.
This information will be sought for the first time under NPR which was previously collected under the Census exercise.
The NPR is a detailed extraction of information for a biometric database of all “usual residents” in India while the Census was merely a database of households. Along with the ongoing protests of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), the NPR is also being scrutinized by citizens and politicians and is being called to be a disguised NRC.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Saturday told a Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting "not to be under any illusion that the National Population Register (NPR) is a benign exercise since in form and content, NPR 2020 is a disguised NRC."
She said the government had thought that the NRC (National Register of Citizens) exercise could be carried out throughout the country but it hit upon the idea of NPC after the disastrous results of the Assam NRC.
The BJP government which had initially brought NPR as the first-step towards NRC is now claiming that the two have no links.
NPR, which has been in use since the UPA government, is used during the Census to calculate the Indian population and accordingly churn out schemes as and when needed.
