Union minister of state for home Nityanand Rai on Tuesday said Assam will be excluded from the National Population Register (NPR) exercise.
Disclosing this in the Parliament on Tuesday, Rai said NPR was first prepared in 2010 and updated in 2015 under Sub-rule(4) of Rule 3 of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003, framed under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
“Under the same Rule, NPR is being updated along with House listing and Housing Census Operations of Census 2021 between April 1, 2020-September 30, 2020 in all the states/union territories except Assam,” said Rai.
The scheme for the preparation of NPR in 2010 was approved at a cost of Rs 6649.05 crore including the cost of its updating in 2015.
“The approved cost for Census 2021 is Rs. 8754.23 crore and for the update of NPR 2020 is Rs.3941.35 crore,” Rai said.
Earlier on December 24, 2019, the Union Cabinet had approved the proposal for conducting the Census of India 2021 and update of the NPR.
The decision was taken in a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Officials said that the Census of India will cover the entire population in the country while NPR will also cover all the population except in the state of Assam.
The Indian Census is the largest administrative and statistical exercise in the world.
The next decennial Census is due in 2021 and would be conducted in two phases including House listing and Housing Census from April to September 2020 and Population Enumeration from February 9 to 28, 2021.
The use of mobile app for data collection and the Central portal for monitoring purposes will ensure the early release of Census data with improved quality.