Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday mooted the idea of a multipurpose identity card for citizens with all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, driving licence and bank accounts. Shah also said the Census 2021 data will be collected through mobile app. The Home Minister said there should also be a system that when a person dies, the information is updated in the population data automatically. “We can have just one card for all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving licence, voter card. This is a potential,” he said.
Shah also said the Census 2021 data will be collected through mobile app. “A mobile app will be used in Census 2021. It will be a transformation from paper census to digital census,” Shah said. He added that the Centre was likely set to spend Rs 12,000 crore on the 2021 Census as well as the preparation of the NPR.
Media reports had said that following the Assam NRC, the Centre was keen on preparing a NPR by September 2020 to lay the foundation for rolling out a citizens’ register across the country. The NPR will be a list of usual residents of the country. Once the NPR is completed and published, it is expected to be the basis for preparing the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC), a pan-India version of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), an official was quoted as saying.
