Panel on Demographic Changes to Visit Metro, Industrial, Border Areas

PTI photo

NEW DELHI: A high-level committee on demographic changes, constituted recently under Justice (retd) Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar, will visit metropolitan areas and industrial towns, apart from border areas, as part of its assignment to examine the nature, causes and impact of demographic changes across the country, including due to illegal immigration. It will recommend policy, administrative and legal frameworks to address the issue in a time-bound manner. Home minister Amit Shah Saturday chaired a meeting with senior MHA officials to review arrangements for proper facilitation of the committee. The first meeting of the panel has already been convened and its agenda formulated. “MHA will provide logistical and other necessary support for proper functioning of the committee,” a ministry official said. According to a source, many illegal immigrants, particularly Bangladesh, have over the years travelled further to metropolitan areas and towns with a heavy concentration of industries. The onward journey usually takes place after securing identity documents like Aadhaar cards from tout networks and illegal agents. While notifying the panel last month, MHA had said demographic changes were visible in certain regions that were 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 said, was impacting public service delivery, local governance, resource distribution and social cohesion. The panel, tasked with recommending a permanent operational system for legal, fair and time-bound identification, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants, comes at a time when BJP is in office in the infiltration-prone states of Assam, Tripura and West Bengal. It has been given a year to submit its final report.