Citizens activism through the Right to Information Act (RTI) has revealed how a giant step towards National Population Register (NPR) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) has been possibly taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) when the Aadhaar database was linked with the NPR database in 2015. The creation of an NPR database began first in 2010 and was abandoned thereafter due to difficulties.
While the only legal way of linking the two databases is by acquiring informed consent from every resident through an exercise similar to the Census, which means through a public exercise conducted by the Registrar General of India (RGI), the process appears to have happened without any informed consent.
There is yet another angle or twist.
In 2020, at the height of the nationwide agitation against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), NPR and NRC, the union government had announced that the Census (now not conducted since 2011 and which was statutorily due in 2021) will also be conducted with the NPR simultaneously.
There was an outcry of protest against this move as several state governments called for a boycott against answering questions pertaining to NPR in the Census form. Four specific questions were included in the Census form related to the NPR-NRC. For instance, information related to parents’ places and dates of birth were sought.These are not answers that Census data ever seeks.
Pushed into a corner by several unaffiliated state governments, the home ministry was compelled to admit that answering questions in the NPR is purely voluntary while under the Census Act, 1948, there is a legal obligation to answer all the questions put every ten years.
The Census process is oral and conducted by designated officers of the RGI without any document that takes or asks for signatures. The census data collection, house-listing and household data collection is crucial for understanding demographics and formulation of policies.
In contrast, the enumeration for the NPR can only be conducted under the provisions of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 which in fact goes beyond the amended Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, 1955 (amended in 2004) and is therefore arguably ultra vires of the act itself; Section 14A of the amended Citizenship Act, 1955 (amendment in 2004) simply states that the government “may compulsorily register every citizen as a citizen of India and issue a national identity card to him”. It is the rules that ascribe the process of NPR enumeration not the act. Both Section 14A and the rules are currently under challenged in the Supreme Court.
Given this background to the manner in which the Union government has been reluctant to share information publicly, also given its doubtful credentials over data collection and maintenance of data integrity, 2023 brought another surprise.
Also read: Rules Under CAA Now Ready, Likely to Be Notified Before 2024 Elections: Reports
The Annual Report 2021-22 of MHA declared that crucial personal data – that can only be collected through a rigorous door-to-door enumeration process by officials under the RGI and which includes name, gender, date and place of birth, place of residence, father’s and mother’s name was (already) collected, albeit in a secretive manner, by seeding Aadhaar, mobile numbers and ration card details. A series of RTIs has led us to conclude that the exercise was conducted without the informed consent of Indians. A further scrutiny of home ministry reports of 2010, 2015-2016 and 2020 raises more questions.
The scale of NPR-Aadhaar linkage
How many of the NPR updated records contain details from the Aadhaar card and have the Aadhaar number?
While the 2020 NPR manual mentions that Aadhaar numbers in the NPR booklet came from the 2015-2016 exercise of “updating the NPR”, the RGI is silent on this and repeated efforts to seek replies from the RGI under the RTI have not helped clarify the exact scale of the linkage.
The 2014-15 annual report of the home ministry mentioned that the “data digitisation process has been completed” and a database of “119.19 crore persons created.” The 2017-18 annual report of the ministry contradicts this and underlines “demographic data of 119.95 crore persons was collected in 2010 and has been updated during 2015- 16 in all States/UTs except Assam and Meghalaya”.
While there are several annual reports of MHA that give a count of the NPR records linked with Aadhaar numbers, those reports correspond to the period before the updating exercise of 2015-16. The annual report of 2014-15 states that the NPR data of more than 23.51 crore persons has been set to UIDAI for duplication and generation of Aaadhaar number, of which UIDAI generated 19.67 crore Aadhaar numbers, which is in turn a quarter of the 80.46 crore Aadhaar database generated by UIDAI.
While there are several annual reports of MHA that give a count of the NPR records linked with Aadhaar numbers, those reports correspond to the period before the updating exercise of 2015-16. The annual report of 2014-15 states that the NPR data of more than 23.51 crore persons has been sent to UIDAI for duplication — this means seeding of data collected for purposes for proof of residence, Aadhaar — and generation of Aaadhaar number being used as base data for the NPR. From this 23.51 crore strong data of Aadhaar records UIDAI generated 19.67 crore Aadhaar numbers, which is in turn a quarter of the 80.46 crore Aadhaar database generated by UIDAI.
This number could only have grown after the 2015-16 exercise, which was intended to be a giant leap for the scale of linkage. The official records are clear that the leap did take place but unclear on the scale or implications.
Is the NPR-Aadhaar linkage illegal?
The NPR database is distinct from the Aadhaar database. The former draws strength from the amended section 14A of the Citizenship Act, that provides for the possibility of a National Identity Card for Citizens (rules outline the NPR as the procedure to achieve this).
The Aadhaar card is simply a proof of residence, with biometric data collection to enable access to government schemes etc. The legal provision for Aadhaar came through the Aadhaar Act of 2016, which made informed consent of the holder of the Aadhaar number mandatory for its use for any specific purpose. After the 2018 judgement in the Aadhaar case limiting its proliferation (that struck down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act that enabled private entities to use Aadhaar data for services), serious issues of policy incursions into privacy have also been flagged.
The issue is complex. In 2010, an exercise thereafter amended, demographic information for the NPR were collected through a door-to-door enumeration process conducted by RGI, on the basis of a signed form; thereafter this exercise was abandoned. The Aadhaar number was assigned by the UIDAI authorities after the collection of biometric data including photographs, ten fingerprints and IRIS prints. The Aadhaar number is supposed to be the link between the records of one person in the two databases.
However, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003 did not provide for the linking of databases controlled by two different agencies. The data for Aadhaar had actually been collected by various private agencies through camps, and not through any door-to-door visit by enumerators engaged by RGI. The wholesale linkage that happened till 2015, without specific consent of any of the Aadhaar number holders, was not backed by that law or any other law. Thus, the legitimacy of NPR – as of 2015 – is highly questionable.
Besides, the very purpose of NPR has been to establish residency (and then citizenship) on the basis of documentation, shifting the burden of proof on an individual that will then expose himself to the tyranny of a local bureaucracy controlled by governments. Absence or anomalies in these documents will lead to arbitrary exclusions from the “ordinary residents” (citizenship list) causing untold hardships and social upheavals. As the lived current experience of the state of Assam reveals. The exercise is not just fundamentally unfair, the ultra vires process exposes the defenceless individual to the judgment of local authorities.
In December 2019, the passage of the religion biased Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) caused outrage. Assertions by senior functionaries of the present union government that the implementation of the CAA-NPR-NRC would “follow a chronology” led to legitimate fears that this was the aggressive first step to use the tyranny of a bureaucratic document test to exclude hundreds of thousands of disempowered and marginalised Indians from their citizenship. Now fears of this “chronology” being set in motion any day may be realised as the CAA Rules (pending since 2019 when the Act was passed) are underway.
Assam has spent Rs 1,700 crore from the public exchequer on an excruciating exercise that has burdened not just the state but a third plus of the 3.3 crore population. At least 1.3 crore Assam’s citizens are in one way or another affected by the citizenship crisis. Arbitrary exclusions have been marked by baseless “notices” being sent by the Assam Border Police and Foreigner Tribunals (adjudicating bodies controlled by the state executive) and while a significant 2,22,000 citizens and their families reel under the burden of either being excluded from the NRC or being declared “suspected foreigners” or “D” Voters, our experience on the ground shows that 99% or more are “genuine’ Indians.
Also read: Here’s Why the BJP Brings up the CAA – But Stops Short of Implementing it – in Bengal
The linkage of NPR with the Aadhaar database, without informed consent and in a hasty and secretive manner, creates further possibility of anomalies and mismatch in documents Added to this, the the proviso, contained in the 2003 Rules that shift the burden of proof on individuals to “prove” citizenship is a recipe made for large-scale social disaster and a humanitarian crisis.
It was this belated realisation that had most likely led the MHA to abandon the pilot project begun earlier (obliquely referred to MHA annual report 2008-09). The complication referred to here is the lack of documentation of genuine citizens in this country, and also the imbalance of the power equation between the common man and the local face of the government. The same complications apply equally to genuine residents.
A union government that is truly representative of all Indians will, from the Assam experience, understand this problem. An unaccountable regime may not.
A collective citizens’ investigation by Metiabruz Kolkatta in close collaborators with Citizens for Justice and Peace.
Teesta Seetalvad is a senior journalist and secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace.
