India?s Home Minister Rajnath Singh gave government officials a three-year deadline to identify citizens through the National Population Register (NPR). The NPR is a comprehensive identity database used for India?s census.

Recently, the NPR was conferred as India?s favored national identification scheme by the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. During recent national elections, the BJP promised both to end the Aadhaar biometrics registration project and to crack down on welfare fraud.

The BJP has argued that Aadhaar, which is the world?s biggest biometrics database, was a fraudulent, unconstitutional and costly scheme devised to enrich Congress Party politicians through impartial contracts.

The BJP?s view is that the Aadhaar system, designed primarily to provide access to social programs, does not adequately delineate between an actual citizen and a migrant worker.

Therefore, non-citizens may have access to social programs under the Aadhaar system, to which they are not entitled.

The BJP also notes that the Aadhaar project duplicated existing population registration efforts undertaken by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India. As a consequence, the BJP has decided to re-focus on NPR through a series of actions.