New Delhi: After its turf war with Nandan Nilekani-led UIDAI, the Registrar-General of India has completed data entry of 66.68 crore population and biometrics of 3.12 crore people across the country for preparing a National Population Register.
"The capture of biometrics for NPR is in progress and, as on date, data entry of 66.68 crore people and biometrics of 3.12 crore people have been completed," a Home Ministry official said.
The scanning of population enumeration schedules has been completed. The data processing of more than 24.3 crore -- about 90 per cent -- out of the total of 27 crore schedules has been completed.
"Under the coastal NPR, more than 31.78 lakh cards have been produced so far," the official said.
This comes a month after Home Minister P Chidambaram wrote a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh complaining that the NPR project is "almost at a standstill" due to the refusal of UIDAI to accept the NPR data for de-duplication and generation of Aadhaar numbers.
Following the protest, the government has directed the UIDAI to accept the biometric data collected by RGI under the Home Ministry to give unique ID number to every citizen.
That was for the second time that Chidambaram took up at the highest level the issue of capturing the biometric data of the population by UIDAI and its alleged non-cooperation with the RGI project.
The UIDAI comes under the nodal authority of the Planning Commission.
The government had taken a number of important decisions concerning internal security after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. One of these was that the NPR project would be taken up in selected coastal villages on a priority basis and then rolled out in a phased manner in all coastal villages and towns as part of the measures to enforce coastal security.
Subsequently, the government decided to implement this project across the country.
The coastal NPR project has been completed to a large extent and the data required for the rest of the country has been collected along with Census 2011 and digitisation of the same is proceeding at a rapid pace.
The UIDAI had initially been given the mandate to cover 10 crore population. This was subsequently raised to 20 crore.
Sources said field work for the second round of Annual Health Survey has been completed in all the 284 districts in nine annual health survey states -- Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.
The field work of third party audit is likely to be completed shortly, sources said.
PTI
