New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday proposed the idea of a multipurpose identity card for citizens with all utilities like passport, Aadhar, driving licence and bank accounts.
Speaking at the foundation stone laying ceremony for construction of a new building of Registrar General of India (RGI) that conducts the census exercise, Shah said the digital census has the potential to bring all kinds of cards such as Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving license under one platform. “Why is it so difficult to link and update birth and death registration with census data?” he asked astonishingly.
Shah said earlier the government used to do welfare schemes on a piecemeal basis and no comprehensive planning was done by previous governments. “The whole approach was changed when Narendra Modi became the prime minister in 2014. The approach has been changed completely, the thinking has been changed. Goals have been set to completely eradicate the problems,” he said.
The decennial Census exercise will be undertaken in 2021 and for the first time, will move from paper to digital format. Shah also said ₹12,000 crore would be spent on preparation of National Population Register (NPR) and census.
Briefing it further Shah said that the NPR will be updated on a priority basis as it helps in tracking criminal activities and better planning and execution of government schemes. The NPR links biometric and demographic details of any ordinary resident of the country, thus making it a comprehensive database of residents.
The NPR exercise is different from the decennial census and is not linked to the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
