The National Population Register (NPR) is a comprehensive register of every "usual resident" of India, defined as a person who has resided in a local area for at least the past six months or intends to reside there for the next six months or more. It is a scheme/database, not an Act, prepared under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955, specifically Section 14A (inserted by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003) and the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003.
The NPR's origin is rooted in the legal architecture created by the 2003 Amendment to the Citizenship Act, which empowered the Central Government to compulsorily register every citizen and issue national identity cards. The first NPR data collection was carried out in 2010 alongside the house-listing phase of Census 2011, with the objective of creating a comprehensive identity database of every usual resident for better governance and policy formulation.
The mechanism involves a house-to-house enumeration, ordinarily conducted by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India (RGI) during the house-listing phase of the decennial Census. Enumerators collect specified demographic particulars, such as name, date and place of birth, and present and permanent addresses. The data is compiled at the local, sub-district, district, state, and national levels.
The NPR is intrinsically connected to the concept of the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC), which is a register of only Indian citizens. Rule 4 of the 2003 Rules provides that the NPR serves as the foundational database from which the NRIC may be derived, with the Local Registrar verifying the particulars and marking those whose citizenship is "doubtful" for further inquiry. The NPR was last updated in 2015 to incorporate details like Aadhaar and mobile numbers. The next update was approved in December 2019 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NPR is now expected to be updated alongside the house-listing phase of the Census 2027.