Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Maken has urged citizens to retain the slips given to them after submitting the filled up census forms as these would be needed during the National Population Register exercise.
Mr. Maken was taking stock of the ongoing enumeration exercise at R. K. Puram here on Tuesday. He was accompanied by local MLA Barkha Singh.
Mr. Maken urged census officials and enumerators to inform citizens on the importance of the slip during the NPR exercise which involves taking bio-metric identification by means of fingerprint impression, iris impression and photograph of individuals.
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It was earlier reported that many people had failed to retain the slips as officials had not informed them about its importance besides the procedural delays that would be caused by its loss.
Regarding creation of NPR in coastal areas, Mr. Maken said data collection was over in seven States and four Union Territories. In the remaining two States of Maharashtra and West Bengal, it would be completed by June 2010, he said. “The biographical details of about 1.16 crore people and biometric details of more than 61 lakh people have been collected so far,” he said.
Ruing the fact that many landlords were not permitting their tenants to get listed in the census exercise, Mr. Maken reiterated that the information given in the census would be kept strictly confidential. Accurate information and data were instrumental to the success of the entire census exercise, he stressed.
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The Minister also detailed the current status and progress of the NPR, house listing and housing census being carried out in the States and Union Territories.
Data collection had been completed in Assam, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Meghalaya, Goa, Delhi (partly), Himachal Pradesh (synchronous areas), Sikkim, Lakshadweep, Orissa, Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Dadar & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu, he said.
“It is almost completed in Andhra and Tripura and in the case of West Bengal, for a few areas of the State, the date has been extended up to June 30 though it is mostly complete,” Mr. Maken said.
He added that substantial progress has been made in Delhi, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Haryana, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir (synchronous areas), Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, while the census exercises commenced successfully in Himachal Pradesh (non-synchronous areas), Tamil Nadu, Nagaland, Puducherry and Manipur on June 1.