By IANS,
New Delhi : After the successful completion of a pilot project on a multi-purpose identity card, the government is planning to dovetail the preparation of a National Population Register (NPR) with the 2011 Census, Home Minister Shivraj Patil said Thursday.
“The data in the NPR will have specified characteristics of each individual. The photograph and finger biometrics will be added subsequent to the census,” Patil said at a two-day data users’ Conference for the 2001 Census.
He also said that the creation of a NPR would usher in an era of register-based census in the country. This would help in having estimates of population on a real-time basis by combining it with the system of registration of births and deaths in the country.
Patil kicked off the process for conducting India’s next official census, the largest administrative exercise in the world involving some billion-plus people.