Registrar General & Census Commissioner Of India

Question 1

Short note on Registrar General & Census Commissioner of India:

Answer 1

The Indian Census is the largest single source of a variety of statistical information on different characteristics of the people of India.

The first census of India was conducted in the 1870s and attempted to collect data across as much of the country as was feasible.

The first of the decennial censuses took place in 1881.

Until 1961, RESPONSIBILITY OF ARRANGING, CONDUCTING AND ANALYSING THE RESULTS OF THE CENSUS was exercised by a temporary administrative structure that was put in place for each census and then dismantled.

From 1960 onwards, the office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India has existed as a permanent department of central government; each state and union territory has a supervisory Directorate of Census Operations.

The importance of large quantities of detailed and varied demographic data increased as India moved towards adoption of five-year development plans.

YEATTS was appointed as Commissioner for the 1951 census but died in 1948 and was replaced by R. A. GOPALASWAMI.

NATIONAL POPULATION REGISTER (NPR) PROJECT:

2010:

The NPR project was conceptualised in 2010 during the tenure of UPA-II but the officials had only been asked to collect data of residents.

It was on several occasions at loggerheads with Unique Identification Authority’s (UIDAI) Aadhaar card as both projects had overlapping features like biometrics identification.

2014:

Giving a thrust to the BJP’s poll promise of weeding out illegal immigrants from the country, Home Minister Rajnath Singh has set a three-year deadline for officials to identify Indian citizens in the country through the National Population Register (NPR) project.

The government also wants officials to conduct door-to-door verification across the country and issue NPR cards only to Indian nationals.

The government is also planning to link NPR to voting rights, which means election identity cards would not be the sole document for eligibility to vote.