• All reported births and deaths in India will be digitally registered on the Centre’s portal starting from October 1.
• Digital birth certificates will serve as a single document for various purposes, including admission to educational institutions, driving license applications, government jobs, passports, Aadhaar, voter enrollment, and marriage registration.

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• This is a result of the Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, which enables the issuance of digital birth certificates.
• The Act also mandates the collection of Aadhaar numbers of parents and informants, if available, during birth registration.
• The centralized database will update the National Population Register (NPR), ration cards, property registration, and electoral rolls.
  • NPR, originally collected in 2010 and updated in 2015, has a database of 119 crore residents and is a step toward the creation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as per the Citizenship Act.
• States will be required to register births and deaths on the Centre’s Civil Registration System (CRS) portal and share the data with the Registrar-General and Census Commissioner.
• As of March 31, Aadhaar has achieved a saturation rate of 93% for a projected population of 138.72 crore.

National Population Register (NPR)

• NPR is a database containing a list of all usual residents of the country.
  • A usual resident for the purposes of NPR is a person who has resided in a place for six months or more and intends to reside there for another six months or more.
• Its objective is to have a comprehensive identity databaseof people residing in the country.
• It is generated through house-to-house enumeration during the “house-listing” phase of the

National Register of Citizens (NRC)

• According to Citizenship Rules 2003, NPR is the first step towards compilation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC).
  • After a list of residents is created (i.e., NPR), a nationwide NRC could go about verifying the citizens from that list.
• However, unlike the NRC, the NPR is not a citizenshipenumeration drive as it records even a foreigner staying in a locality for more than six months.
• NRC is a register prepared after the conduct of the Census of 1951 in respect of each village, showing the houses or holdings in a serial order and indicating against each house or holding the number and names of persons staying therein.