Govt looking at ways to make Aadhaar work with NPR

Home Minister chaired a meeting reviewing aspects of these projects

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is examining how to bring synergy between the National Population Register (NPR) and the Aadhaar card projects to make them ''complementary'' while at the same time avoid duplication.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh chaired an inter-minsterial meeting on the issue on Thursday in which Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Minister of State for Planning Rao Inderjit Singh attended.

The meeting came against the backdrop of the Home Ministry suggesting that NPR and Aadhaar schemes should be merged under the Registrar General of India (RGI). Another option given by the Ministry was division of work in such a way that enrolment is done by NPR while UIDAI, which runs Aadhaar, carried out de-duplication ahead of generating the unique number.

During Lok Sabha election campaigning, Singh had told Deccan Herald that once BJP comes to power, they will review whether Aadhaar cards are needed or not.

At the meeting, the three ministers reviewed various aspects of NPR and Aadhaar and discussed ways to avoid duplication between the two and about the suggestion of combining NPR and Aadhaar schemes.

 The secretaries of the three ministries will meet again to take the matter forward.

The BJP has been critical of UPA’s flagship Aadhaar scheme and a parliamentary standing committee, headed by BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, had found fault with its duplication with NPR exercise and security concerns arising out of its enrolment process.

Verifying nationals

The Home Minister has already set a three-year deadline to identify genuine Indian citizens through the NPR project.

The government also wants enumerators to conduct door-to-door verification across the country and issue NPR cards only to Indian nationals.

The UIDAI provides a unique identification number to all resident Indians. About Rs 3,500 crore was spent on Aadhaar programme with enrolment of 50 crore people.