Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on Wednesday urged district Collectors to ensure expeditious enrolment of people under the National Population Register (NPR) so that the State was in a position to issue smart cards (family cards) to all families at the earliest. She made this appeal at the inauguration of a three-day-long conference of District Collectors and police officers at the Secretariat here.
As part of the process of enrolment, bio-metric information of residents was being collected. Till now, nearly 70 per cent of the people (aged five years and above) had been covered. Of a total of about 6.74 crore, the bio-metric details of around 4.71 crore had been collected.
For getting an Aadhaar number, every resident had to enrol under the NPR. About 3.38 crore people were so far assigned Aadhaar numbers, says a senior official of the Census Department here.
On the issue of law and order, the Chief Minister said the State “had largely been free of communal, left wing extremist, and religious fundamentalist violence,” because she had given the police force and the district administration “a free hand and unstinting support in maintaining law and order.” Referring to her ‘Thirteen Point Plan’ to tackle the problem of sexual violence against women, she told the officers that “as more and more instances of sexual violence are being reported across the country, it is very important to continue to keep Tamil Nadu free of this scourge.”
Pointing out that rainfall during the north-east monsoon had so far been much below the expected level, she wanted the officers to be fully geared up to swing into action to counter any kind of unforeseen weather-related distress. She also expressed the hope that the State would still receive more rain as the season was not yet over.
