Rajnath directs officials to revive National Registry of Indian Citizens

In a move to ensure Bangladeshi immigrants weren’t able to pass off as Indians in the future, home minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday directed ministry officials to revive the plan to create the National Register of Indian Citizens.

In a move to ensure Bangladeshi immigrants weren’t able to pass off as Indians in the future, home minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday directed ministry officials to revive the plan to create the National Register of Indian Citizens.

“The home minister directed that effective steps be taken to take the project to its logical conclusion which is the creation of the National Register of Indian Citizens,” a home ministry statement said. Singh’s directions came after a presentation by C Chandramouli, registrar general of citizen registration, explaining how the population register would help enhance national security.

A home ministry official told HT that Singh called for quickly complete enrolment of biometric details in the population register of all residents. Once this exercise is completed, the government would freeze the population register and enroll people register only after they can reasonably explain why they could not make it to the register during the first phase.

In the first instance, this would ensure that future illegal immigrants would not find it easy to pass off as residents. In the third phase, the process of identifying citizens would also be carried out.

The National Population Register contains the demographic details of 1.18 billion people.