Opposition grills Home Secretary on additional columns in NPR form

Mukesh Ranjan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 18

Linking the NPR exercise with NRC, several opposition members today grilled Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla over additional columns in the NPR questionnaire during a meeting of the department-related standing committee on Home.

The National Population Register (NPR), which is set to take off on April 1 to enumerate usual residents of the country, has evoked large-scale controversy, as the government has inserted certain additional questions in the format, including date and place of birth of individuals’ parents.

Sources said during the deliberations on the allocation of fund for conducting NPR and Census exercise in the Budget, opposition members asked the Home Ministry officials the reasons for changing the NPR questionnaire vis-a-vis 2010, when the exercise was first conducted in the country.

“No reasonable answer was provided by them except that the additional questions are optional and people are free not to answer them,” a source said.

When asked, “Will not such persons be marked for not offering the answers on contentious questions,” officials said they would not be marked. But we contended that the exercise may turn out to be a prelude to preparing National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC). On this they had no answer to offer.

Both NPR and NRC have been embroiled in controversy with many groups staging protests across the country. In Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh area, a group of men, women and children have blocked the main road connecting south Delhi with Noida for the past two months.