National Population Register in the context of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003

⭐ Core Definition: National Population Register

The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is meant to be a register of all Indian citizens. The NRC creation was mandated by the 2003 amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955. Its purpose is to document all the legal citizens of India so that the illegal immigrants can be identified and deported. It has been implemented for the state of Assam starting in 2013–2014. The Government of India announced plans to implement it for the rest of the country in 2021, but it has not yet been implemented.

In 2019, the Government passed Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (also referred to as "CAA 2019" or "CAA"), which promised an accelerated naturalisation process for immigrants of persecuted Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Parsi and Jain religious minority communities of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was widely seen as a way to exempt non-Muslims that might fail the criteria for inclusion in NRC, though Jews and Baha'is also falls into this category.

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National Population Register in the context of 2011 Census of India

The 2011 census of India or the 15th Indian census was conducted in two phases, house listing and population enumeration. The House listing phase began on 1 April 2010 and involved the collection of information about all buildings. Information for National Population Register (NPR) was also collected in the first phase, which will be used to issue a 12-digit unique identification number to all registered Indian residents by Unique Identification Authority of India. The second population enumeration phase was conducted between 9 and 28 February 2011. Census has been conducted in India since 1872 and 2011 marks the first time biometric information was collected. According to the provisional reports released on 31 March 2011, the Indian population increased to 1.21 billion with a decadal growth of 17.70%. Adult literacy rate increased to 74.04% with a decadal growth of 9.21%. The motto of the census was Our Census, Our Future.

Spread across 28 states and 8 union territories, the census covered 640 districts, 5,924 sub-districts, 7,935 towns and more than 600,000 villages. A total of 2.7 million officials visited households in 7,935 towns and 600,000 villages, classifying the population according to gender, religion, education and occupation. The cost of the exercise was approximately ₹2,200 crore (US$260 million) – this comes to less than US$0.50 per person, well below the estimated world average of US$4.60 per person.

View the full Wikipedia page for 2011 Census of India

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