SHILLONG: The state government has made it clear that the exercise for National Population Register (NPR) is not aimed at segregating any community.
The statement assumes significance as there are protests against CAA, NRC and NPR citing that these exercises are not inclusive.
According to the government, the NPR was done in Meghalaya in 2010 and this time too, the state has reiterated that NPR exercise will be a normal one and there will be no segregation of any community and the same process and procedure will be followed.
A state level conference on Census of India 2021 (house listing & housing census operations and updation of NPR was held in the city on Monday organised by Directorate of Census Operations, Meghalaya and state nodal department for Census.
Vivek Joshi, Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, while addressing the meeting through video conferencing from New Delhi, said that NPR was first conducted in 2010 and is being updated along with house listing operations. He assured that the census data is used only for policy decision making of the government and that data is released at the aggregate level only and no individual information will be disclosed.
Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said that the NPR would allow the government to have more detailed information about the households and the exercise will be for the benefit of the people.
“The state is absolutely prepared for the census exercise and the conference was held to ensure that entire government machinery becomes active, sensitised and trained for the exercise”, he said. ‘Given the past experience, we have seen that there is gap in the execution at the grass-roots level. Hence it is critical to ensure that the enumerators, supervisors and field level functionaries are sensitised on the importance of their work’, the chief minister said.
Chief Secretary MS Rao said the implementation of the digital mode of census will improve the quality.
The Census of India 2021 will implement mobile app based solution for data collection.
The census will be divided into two phases. The first phase will include house listing and housing census operations and updation of NPR while the second phase is kept for population enumeration.
Joram Beda, Director of Census Operations dwelt on various questions and concepts related to census questionnaire.
Bharati Chanda, Deputy Registrar General this will be the first digital census of the country where data will be collected on smart phones.
She said census data is the foundation of democracy as delimitation of constituencies is done as per census data.
