Agartala: Amid widespread protest across the state and country against the National Population Register (NPR), the Tripura state government has started preparation to collect data for updating the NPR.
A team of 11,000 officials would be deployed across the state to collect data through the mobile application as part of census operation done after every 10 years.
Speaking with reporters, Director of census operations in state PK Chakraborty said that around 11,000 people would be deployed across the state to collect data as a part of census operation.
“The collection of data will begin from May 16 and would continue till June 29. The data like house listing and house census would be done in the first phase”, Chakraborty said.
He added that in Tripura the data would be collected through mobile application only.
“The Tripura state census coordination committee headed by chief secretary Manoj Kumar in a recent meeting has decided to use the mobile application only”, Chakraborty said.
Further, he said the 11,000 official will include, 9,062 enumerators, 1,556 Supervisors, 9 principal census officers, 81 charge officers, additional charge officers.
“The enumerators will collect data with the use of mobile application will become much easier and faster in comparison to pen and paper survey. In places where poor connectivity will be faced by the officials, the data can still be entered in the application and later be uploaded from internet connectivity zone,” Chakraborty said.
He also said that though NPR is subsidiary to census operations but the difference between the census data and NPR is that, the census data is governed by a confidentiality clause, while the NPR is not.
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“The new queries like respondent’s place of birth, name, sex, marital status, mother tongue, driving license, EPIC card, mobile number and other details have been included in the sub-section of the survey,” Chakraborty added.
He also informed that NPR is a regular exercise that was earlier done in 2010-11 and was updated in 2015. According to the 2011 census, the total population registered was over 35.73 lakh, however, the number is a little more since number of employees deployed in military forces was not included in it.
“The NPR was first surveyed in 2010 and it contained about 15 questions. A set of questions have been added freshly as a sub-section to the existing questions. No separate question has been added to the questioner. The NPR survey would be collected through a 14 point survey,” Chakraborty added.
He also appealed to the people to not panic and coordinate with the enumerators during the survey starting May.
