Multipurpose Card Comprising Aadhaar, Passport, Voter ID And More, Recommends Amit Shah

With less than two years left for the Census 2021, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday mooted the idea of a multipurpose identity card for citizens with all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, driving licence, bank accounts and others. "We can have just one card for all utilities like Aadhaar, passport, bank account, driving licence, voter card. This is a potential," Shah said addressing an event in Delhi this morning.

The BJP president also stressed on the importance of digital census, confirming that data for Census 2021 will be collected through a mobile app, in a bid to shorten the time of publication of the result. The app, build indigenously, will be also incorporated with a system that will update the population data automatically when a person dies.

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Census 2021, the world's largest enumeration exercise, will be conducted in two phases in March 2021. A total of 33 lakh enumerators, the persons who conduct door-to-door counting, are encouraged to use their own phone to collect data for which notification has already been issued.

In the first phase, house listing operations would be conducted in any two months chosen by the states between April and September in 2020. In the second phase, actual population enumeration would be done during February 9 to 28, 2021, followed by the revision round from March 1 to 5, 2021.

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In Jammu and Kashmir and snow-bound areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, population enumeration would be conducted during September 11 to 30, 2020, followed by the revision round from October 1 to 5, 2020.

Meanwhile, a pre-test of Census 2021 is underway which is slated to end on September 30. The exercise was started on August 12, 2019.