Have Aadhar? You still have to enrol for NPR

You may have undergone lot of pain to apply for voluntary unique identification (UID) or an Aadhaar number. Soon, you will also have to visit another camp to get the union home ministry's national identity card.

Updated on: Jan 28, 2012, 24:34:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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You may have undergone lot of pain to apply for voluntary unique identification (UID) or an Aadhaar number. Soon, you will also have to visit another camp to get the union home ministry's national identity card.

If you have not got a UID card yet, you can get both Aadhaar number and the identity card after providing your biometric details at one of the ministry's

camp conducted for collecting details for National Population Register (NPR).

Home minister P Chidambaram said biometric details of those having Aadhaar numbers would not be collected again but the information provided for it will be verified in the NPR data. "In case of variance NPR data prevails and Aadhaar will be corrected," he said.

It means that 17 crore people, who have sought or received Aadhaar, will have to mandatorily enroll for NPR. Another 40 crore people, which UID Authority now has mandate to enroll in next 18-20 months, will also have to visit an NPR camp.

Planning commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia said allowing the UID authority to enroll further will provide a developmental momentum as it has existing network of registrars in 16 states and union territories. "It was felt that a truly-tested system should not be stopped," he said when asked about the duplication of efforts in these states.

What is important for the government is its bid to link social development schemes such as public distribution system (PDS), old age and widow pensions and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) with Aadhaar to check pilferage and reduce the government's subsidy burden. The government's annual subsidy burden is over Rs 1 lakh crore.

The government has started pilots on Aadhaar-linked PDS in districts such as Medak in Andhra Pradesh where every resident has been covered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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