‘Vande Bharat’: 84 of 141 new repatriation flights for Kerala; only 1 for Karnataka

Bengaluru, Feb 24: Census authorities in Karnataka have requested deputy commissioners in the state’s districts to hold outreach and awareness campaigns about the National Population Register (NPR), as they fear misgivings about the exercise could hurt the forthcoming enumeration of population.

The house-listing phase of the Census and updating of NPR will be rolled out simultaneously by mid-April in the BJP-ruled state.

About 1,50,000 enumerators will handle the massive exercise.

Officials believe widespread awareness will help address concerns about the NPR data-gathering process and make people cooperate with enumerators when they visit houses for both NPR and census work.

“Sensing the kind of questions that enumerators may face when they do house visits, in all video conferences with deputy commissioners of districts, we have requested to establish contact with local representatives,” SB Vijay Kumar, director of Census Operations in Karnataka told news agency. “We have asked them to organise outreach programmes to ensure that people’s doubts are resolved before the information gathering work begins,” he added.

Census operations are handled by the Union home ministry. Several district officials are said to have raised concerns about the possibility of people refusing to share information when the work on the census and NPR begins in two months. This would affect the quality of the census work, making the exercise incomplete.

news channel earlier reported that people in parts of Karnataka had declined to share personal information with officials visiting households in connection with government programmes, suspecting them of gathering data for the yet-to-be unveiled National Register of Citizens, following enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) recently.

Kumar said district authorities will train and sensitise enumerators to tread carefully while gathering information. Enumerators will be told not to demand information but seek it gently.

“We will tell enumerators to proactively engage with people. For instance, if an old man in a village does not know his exact date or place of birth, the enumerator may engage in a conversation with the person that may elicit some anecdotes and roughly establish the year and the place of birth,” the census director said.

As of now, the NPR questionnaire has 21queries, but officials say it has not yet been finalised.

With most of the census and NPR data gathering and storage happening digitally this time, the challenge before census officials is to convince people that the data would remain safe.

“Individual data is sealed and all that we can see is collective data. The information is consolidated and tailor-made. We are telling district officials to create awareness about data safety as well,” Kumar said.

Bengaluru, Mar 24: Underlining the seriousness of the coronavirus, which is spreading like wildfire in Karnataka, renowned Heart Surgeon and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya Dr Devi Shetty on Tuesday predicted that Karnataka alone will have more than 80,000 people affected with the dreaded killer disease COVID-19 if people fail to protect themselves.

He urged the people to cooperate with the Government in preventing its further spread and immediately treat those who are affected.

Dr Shetty, urging the people to remain indoors and not to venture out, said those who are affected should not come out and remain in isolation even in their houses and take all precautions advised by doctors.

He said if 80,000 people in the state were affected, more than 20,000 need to be admitted to Hospital for treatment.

"More than 2000 affected need to be kept under ventilation and it requires more infrastructure in the hospitals," he said.

New Delhi, Mar 2: The bloodthirsty arsonists allegedly hired by pro-CAA politicians in the capital of India to target Muslims, did not spare even the house of a Muslim leader of BJP.

Akhtar Raza, the BJP’s minority cell vice-president for the Delhi Northeast district, is now not in a position to share his pain with anyone. 

Even the police hadn’t come to his rescue, when the mob raising “Jai Sri Ram” slogans burnt down his house at Bhagirathi Vihar Nalla Road in northeast Delhi last week. 

“They were chanting slogans. Around 7pm, they started throwing stones at us. I called for police help. But the police asked me to leave. We managed to flee before they burnt my house and destroyed everything,” Raza, who returned today to witness the destruction, told media persons. 

“Those who attacked us were not locals. They were outsiders. They managed to identify and burn down all the 19 houses belonging to Muslims in this lane,” Raza said.

Apart from all the belongings in the house of Raza, the arsonists also have burnt down six vehicles belonging to his family. 

Raza is sad that no one from BJP contacted him after the violence even though he has been serving the party and promoting its ideology for past five years. “No party leader contacted me. There was no phone call. There was no relief or special treatment or anything,” Raza said.

Interestingly, Raza is still indentifies himself as a BJP leader. “I belonged to BJP. I may continue in the party,” he said.

The locality remained tense on Sunday too. On Monday, several groups distributed relief materials among people who had queued up to collect them. In front of Raza’s house is a lane from which several bodies of innocent Muslims have been recovered.