How The National Population Register Data Will Be Gathered
Two past state surveys hold a lot of lessons for Census 2021 and the NPR on data leaks, voter profiling and deletions of voters.
The National Population Register will be updated using a mobile application, as part of the 2021 Census of India. There is virtually no difference between the census and the updation of the NPR. Both will be carried out of the same census survey. This is the first time the census is being carried out using a mobile application instead of using the traditional census enumerator forms. The Office of the Registrar General of India has already built the mobile applications and has piloted them in various districts in the country.
An examination of the application manual handed to enumerators offers insight about the process of data collection for the National Population Register. The enumerators will be allotted various blocks to gather details of the population and to update incomplete information from the past data already held within the register. It allows the enumerator to update details of every individual with a varied set of options.
For example, the enumerator can skip an entire household for it being locked or mark the family as migrated depending on their status.
Along with the options for the enumerator, the application also provides the option for individuals to study the collected data of a household and certify it using a signature. It is possible that as part of the process, this certification might be sought from each member of the household. While this appears like a smooth exercise of self-certified data collection, the complexities that could arise due to erroneous inputs are endless, given the varying levels of digital literacy in the country.
The Origins Of Indian Citizenship
The NPR app’s collection of identity details like Aadhaar, voter ID, driver’s license, PAN, and mobile number is also a serious problem as there are specific laws required for linking this kind of data.
Other institutions like Election Commission of India, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Central Board of Direct Taxes have all needed laws to link Aadhaar with respective identity cards under them.
With ECI and MoRTH yet to bring laws to link Aadhaar, the collection of these parameters—even voluntarily—for the NPR is outright illegal and violates the Supreme Court orders in Puttaswamy vs Union of India.
The NPR project also has a history of sharing Aadhaar data until the Aadhaar Act of 2016 was framed with no investigation yet into illegal data sharing by the respective authorities.
Past Use Of App-Based Surveys
The National Population Register intends to take over the census to create real-time databases of citizenship and civil registration. Government reports and manuals point to this direction with birth and death registries to be integrated with NPR. This is not the first time the idea of mobile app-based surveys or real-time registries is being tried out in the country. After the creation of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh carried out a complete survey of the state and its residents in 2016 using a mobile application. This ‘Smart Pulse Survey’ integrated all forms of census including livestock, fisheries, and agriculture into the exercise.
The Smart Pulse Survey involved sending enumerators with mobile phones and biometric devices to carry out eKYC of every resident in Andhra Pradesh. This exercise resulted in mapping the geolocation of every household using the mobile phones' GPS devices and the data of every individual living in the state. The aim of the survey included the seeding of Aadhaar data to all databases, deleting the records of dead people, eliminating duplicate records and to create a single source of truth using State Resident Data Hubs or SRDH.
Prone To Misuse
In February 2019, The Times of India reported that a police probe was launched following a complaint that the profile data of 3.7 crore voters had been breached from the Andhra Pradesh SRDH, and was being used by the Telugu Desam Party. The complaint was against a private company ‘IT Grids Pvt. Ltd.’ that created an app for the TDP cadre called ‘Seva Mitra’, with all the voter data pre-filled. The company was raided by Telangana Police in Hyderabad and a special investigation team was created to investigate this data theft of both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana voters.
The Election Commission of India denied the photos of voters and voter data had leaked from its databases, even though records from the ECI indicate that it had shared voter data including photos with the SRDH database for linking Aadhaar with voter cards. In its bid to link Aadhaar to voter cards across the country, in 2015 the ECI had carried out a National Electoral Roll Purification-Authentication Programme. As a part of this, the ECI, asked the Registrar General of India and other government departments to share this data from NPR and SRDH databases. In states like Andhra Pradesh, it shared the data with SRDH.
The idea of the smart pulse survey was taken from a similar intensive household ‘Samagraha Kutumba Survey’ in Telangana, which was carried out after the state was formed in 2014. However, this was done using paper forms for enumeration instead of using a mobile application. The Telangana government too used this data and linked it to other databases of the state to create yet another 360-degree database called ‘Samagraha Vedika’. No details of the creation of this database were available to anyone in the state until a mention in the economic survey of 2018-19, as a best practice to adopt toward the creation of an India 'Enterprise Architecture' for real-time governance.
Even after these large scale violations by political parties, the Election Commission of India and the Unique Identification Authority of India do not seem to have seriously investigated what actually transpired.
These two state surveys were pretty controversial and hold a lot of lessons for Census 2021 and the National Population Register in terms of data leaks, voter profiling and deletions of voters.
This is especially a problem with an NPR app collecting both Aadhaar and voter card details, which the Election Commission wants to link again, with a new amendment to the Representation of People’s Act. The upcoming personal data protection law will also allow the government to collect any form of data. This can be done via the exemptions provided in the bill which, in itself, does not grant enough protection to citizens if the data used to harm them.
Srinivas Kodali is an independent researcher working on data, governance and the internet.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.