NEW DELHI: Following up on PM Narendra Modi’s announcement in his last year Independence Day speech, govt on Tuesday constituted a high-level committee to scientifically examine the nature, causes and impact of demographic changes across the country, including due to illegal immigration as well as abnormal population shifts at the levels of religious and social communities, and recommend policy, administrative and legal framework to address the problem in a time-bound manner.
The high-level committee on demographic changes (HLCDC) to be headed headed by retired Supreme Court judge Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar has been formed amid an intensified drive by BJP govts in Assam, West Bengal and other states to curb illegal immigration, which they see as a conspiracy to introduce demographic changes, and expel all infiltrators.
Announcing the panel on Tuesday, Shah said on X, “Unnatural demographic changes caused by illegal immigration and other factors are a serious challenge to any country’s present and future...it is linked not only to our sovereignty, but also to national security, law and order, profound change in social structure, and the preservation of tribal groups.”
This follows the recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls by Election Commission, including in the border state of Bengal, which led to deletion of lakhs of ‘absent’ and ‘other’ electors — their details are already in public domain.
The HLCDC — tasked with recommending a permanent operational system for legal, fair and time-bound identification, detention and deportation of illegal immigrants in the country — comes at a time when BJP is in office in the infiltration-prone states of Assam, Tripura and Bengal.
Sharing that census commissioner Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, retired IAS officer Durga Shankar Mishra, ex-IPS officer Balaji Srivastava and economist Shamika Ravi would be members of the committee, Shah said it will “conduct a comprehensive assessment of demographic changes occurring across India due to illegal immigration and other unnatural causes, analyse pattern of abnormal population shifts at the level of religious and social communities and present a planned and time-bound solution for the same”.
The panel, which will be under the ministry of home affairs (MHA), has been given a year to submit its final report.
Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma has launched an aggressive drive against “illegal” infiltrators and has publicly vowed to push them back into Bangladesh. The newly elected BJP govt in Bengal has quickly got down to the task, with CM Suvendu Adhikari deciding to make land available to complete the fencing of the border with Bangladesh.
Resentment over the continuing influx of illegals were a big factor in BJP’s landslides poll victory in both states.
Notifying the panel, MHA said demographic changes were visible in certain regions that are not attributable to normal fertility or mortality trends, but emerging due to “external abnormal factors such as illegal immigration, irregular population mobility and administrative laxity”.
It added that the demographic changes, though concentrated in border regions, now also affect urban centres, industrial corridors, tribal regions and other socially and economically sensitive areas. This, it noted, was impacting public service delivery, local governance, resource distribution and social cohesion.
“The existing institutional framework has not been adequately equipped to undertake coordinated, evidence-based and time-bound evaluation and response to such demographic shifts,” MHA stated in the notification.
The last comprehensive assessment of illegal immigration and its demographic effect, though limited to Assam, was made by then Assam governor Lt Gen S K Sinha in 1998. He had warned that illegal influx in Assam was turning many of its districts into Muslim majority ones, and could reduce its indigenous people to a minority.
There is currently no reliable estimate of illegal immigrants in the country, with replies to Parliament questions over the years citing different figures. While then home minister Indrajit Gupta had put their number at 1 crore in 1997, then junior home minister Sriprakash Jaiswal in 2004 cited a figure of 1.2 crore, only to disown it as “hearsay”. In 2016, then junior home minister Kiren Rijiju had told Rajya Sabha that there were 2 crore illegal immigrants in the country.
The terms of reference of the panel include studying the challenges arising from the demographic changes and finding their possible causes such as variations in fertility, cross border movement, economic opportunities, and other socio environmental factors. It will also identify factors like illegal immigration, abnormal settlement patterns and planned migration, behind the demographic shifts.
Importantly, the panel shall analyse structural population changes at the level of religious or social communities, especially those divergent from uniform trends.
The committee will suggest an appropriate institutional mechanism to strengthen border management and population stabilisation, besides proposing a comprehensive policy framework to enhance Centre-state coordination on tackling illegal immigration and demographic imbalance.
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