New Delhi: Union home minister Amit Shah has directed the high-level committee on demographic change to "study the shift in population structure in border districts," the news agency PTI has reported, quoting officials.

Shah chaired a meeting of the controversial committee, and asked it to visit border areas, metro cities and industrial towns for an assessment of changes because of illegal migration and other unnatural causes, the report said.

In late May, the retired judge who will head the committee on demographic change, Justice P.P. Naolekar, had said that his selection was a surprise to him and that demography and illegal migration are “new” subjects for him.

The committee will also have former Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Durga Shanker Mishra, former chief of the Bureau of Police Research and Development Balaji Srivastava and economist Shamika Ravi as members. The joint secretary (Foreigners-I) of the home ministry is the member secretary.

The Wire has analysed the questions raised by the fact that this committee does not include a demographer – a fact that raises concerns over the quality of findings that will inform policy changes, but also about bypassing census operations, as Census 2027 is already underway.

The BJP's leaders have often focused on “population explosion” in recent years, claiming to blame minority communities for this.

In tandem with Shah's direction to his committee, it is in the border districts of Bengal and Assam where Bengali-speaking Muslims are being physically pushed into Bangladesh upon suspicion that they are not citizens, in an inhuman process that circumvents the courts.

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