NEW DELHI: Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement in last year’s Independence Day speech, the government has established a high-level committee to investigate the nature, causes, and impacts of demographic changes across the country. This includes issues related to illegal immigration and significant population shifts among various religious and social communities. The committee is tasked with providing recommendations for a policy, administrative, and legal framework to address these challenges within a specified timeframe.
The High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes (HLCDC) will be led by retired Supreme Court Justice Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar. This initiative comes amid heightened efforts by BJP-led governments in states like Assam and West Bengal to curtail illegal immigration, which they perceive as part of a larger scheme to alter the demographic landscape, leading to the expulsion of infiltrators.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced the formation of the panel on social media platform X, emphasizing that “unnatural demographic changes caused by illegal immigration and other factors pose a serious challenge to any country’s present and future,” linking these changes to national sovereignty, security, law and order, and the preservation of tribal groups.
The committee has been assigned a year to submit its final report. Its responsibilities include recommending a permanent and systematic approach for the legal, fair, and timely identification, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants. This comes in the wake of a recent intensive revision of electoral rolls by the Election Commission, particularly in West Bengal, resulting in the removal of thousands of ‘absent’ and ‘other’ electors, information that is already publicly available.
Members of the HLCDC will include Census Commissioner Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, retired IAS officer Durga Shankar Mishra, ex-IPS officer Balaji Srivastava, and economist Shamika Ravi. The panel is charged with conducting a thorough assessment of demographic changes across India attributed to illegal immigration and other unusual causes, analyzing population shifts at the religious and social community levels, and proposing a planned, time-bound solution.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has initiated a robust campaign against what he terms infiltrators, even pledging to return them to Bangladesh. Similarly, the newly elected BJP government in Bengal is prioritizing border security, with Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari committing to facilitate the completion of fencing along the Bangladesh border.
The Ministry of Home Affairs noted that demographic changes in certain regions are not solely due to natural fertility or mortality trends but are influenced by “external abnormal factors such as illegal immigration, irregular population mobility, and administrative laxity.”
