New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government has constituted a high level committee to study “demographic changes arising from illegal immigration and other abnormal reasons”, but this committee does not include a demographer. This has raised questions not only about the quality of findings that will inform policy changes, but also about bypassing census operations, as Census 2027 is already underway. The committee’s sole focus on illegal immigration also ignores real concerns like dropping fertility and an aging population that are contributing to serious demographic changes in the country. The government’s committee, instead, diverts focus, allowing numbers to be weaponised to serve the ruling party’s political agenda.The move to form the committee also follows the BJP’s focus on “population explosion” in recent years, even though data as recent as the sixth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-6) shows India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has stabilised at 2.0, below the replacement level of 2.1. While this has raised concerns about an aging population and disparate regional population growth rates, the BJP instead has sought to continue to stoke fear and keep xenophobia alive by bringing in the bogey of “artificial demographic change” in the country.The Wire spoke at length to demographers, population analysts, political scientists and others who analyse health and population data closely. They said that ad-hoc committees, like the one announced by the home ministry, not only disregard the ongoing Census operations, but serve a political purpose: they highlight “illegal immigration” as India’s sole demographic challenge while ignoring real concerns like dropping fertility rates and an aging population, which are contributing to serious demographic changes and risk diverting attention from securing India’s demographic dividend crucial to its development trajectory.The committee announced by Union home minister Amit Shah on May 26 will be headed by retired Supreme Court Judge Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar. It will also comprise Census Commissioner Mritunjay Kumar Narayan, retired IAS officer Durga Shanker Mishra, retired IPS officer Balaji Srivastava and Shamika Ravi, who is on the PM’s Economic Advisory Council. The Joint Secretary (Foreigners-I) in the MHA will be the Member Secretary. The committee will submit its report in a year.“A serious study of demographic change must include demographic expertise. Demography is a specialised discipline involving fertility, mortality, migration, age structure, population projections, Census methods and survey interpretation,” said Poonam Muttreja, executive director, Population Foundation of India.“It is good that the committee includes Shamika Ravi, an economist, because population change has major implications for labour markets, public finance, regional development and social protection. But the absence of a demographer is a significant gap.”“Without demographic expertise, there is a risk that complex population changes may be interpreted too narrowly or selectively. India’s demographic transition is shaped by multiple factors, such as fertility decline, ageing, internal migration, urbanisation, education, women’s workforce participation and regional inequalities. Besides demographers, inputs from migration scholars, statisticians, public health experts, gender experts, state governments and civil society would be useful.”Who are the members?Justice P.P. Naolekar, who recently said that demography and illegal migration “were new subjects for him”, had a controversial stint as Lokayukta of Madhya Pradesh. When he was named Lokayukta under the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in Madhya Pradesh in 2009, RTI activist Ajay Dubey had alleged then that no selection panel had been made and mandatory procedure had not been followed, the Indian Express has reported. The Lokayukta under him subsequently exonerated Chouhan and his wife Sadhna Singh in a corruption case over the purchase and leave of four dumper machines against the chief minister.Retired IAS officer Durga Shanker Mishra, also on the panel, has served as Uttar Pradesh’s chief secretary and had received three service extensions between 2021 and 2024 before being replaced by Manoj Kumar Singh after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.Retired IPS officer Balaji Srivastava, a 1988-batch IPS officer belonging to the Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories (AGMUT) cadre, also served as Puducherry DGP. In 2021, he was given additional charge as Delhi police commissioner before Rakesh Asthana took over.In 2020, Ravi was at the centre of a plagiarism row when parts of her article on the Indian Express were not attributed to economist Paul Romer, following which the newspaper withdrew it. Ravi issued an apology after the article was withdrawn.Census commissioner Narayan who is also part of the committee, was given an extension in 2024 for two years, paving the way for him to lead the census operations which are underway. Narayan has held the post under the Ministry of Home Affairs since 2020.Justice P.P. Naolekar (fourth from left) stands next to Amit Shah, then BJP’s national president, currently the Union home affairs minister, at the former justice’s residence in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. Source: BJP.orgFocus on illegal immigrationIn a statement on X announcing the formation of the committee, Shah laid focus on “unnatural” demographic change and said that “infiltration and other reasons causing Unnatural Demographic Change pose a very significant challenge to the present and future of any nation”.“Demographic change is a serious issue linked not only to our sovereignty but also to national security, law and order, profound changes in social structure and the preservation of tribal society,” he wrote.“This committee will conduct a comprehensive assessment of demographic changes occurring across India due to illegal immigration and other unnatural causes, analyse patterns of abnormal population shifts at the levels of religious and social communities, and present a planned and time-bound solution for the same.”Accordingly, the terms of reference of the committee also focus on illegal immigration and say that the panel will deliberate upon challenges arising from it, study its possible causes, “such as cross-border activities (including illegal immigration), economic opportunities and other socio-environmental factors”, identify the underlying factors, abnormal settlement patterns and orchestrated migration. It also states that the committee will analyse structural population changes at the level of religious or social communities, “particularly where they deviate from broader trends”.The committee will recommend “a streamlined and permanent operational mechanism for the legal, fair and time-bound identification, detention and deportation of illegal immigrants already residing in the country” as well as appropriate institutional mechanisms to strengthen border management, population stabilisation and identification systems.The committee’s focus on illegal immigration to study demographic changes comes on the back of the centre’s “detect, delete, deport” policy Shah himself announced in parliament in December, while defending the contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls by the Election Commission.“This (lack of a demographer) and the Terms of Reference indicate that the purpose of the commission is not to study demographic change but to limit focus on illegal immigration,” said K.S. James, former director of the International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS), currently working with the Centre for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.“There are serious demographic changes like dropping fertility, population aging and internal and international migration, which appear to be outside the scope of this commission,” says James.The commission, which held its first meeting on Tuesday (June 2, 2026), is likely to study the exclusion of names from SIR rolls and the circumstances around it, and how the names were inserted in the first place, the Hindu has reported.This comes even as the Supreme Court held last week, while upholding the Election Commission’s power to conduct the SIR, that the final determination of citizenship lies with the Union government rather than the poll body. The court further directed the Election Commission to refer persons who do not meet statutory conditions to the Union government and said, “Any deletion effected on this ground shall, therefore, remain subject to the outcome of such adjudication by the appropriate authority.”A protest against the contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, held in Bengaluru, Karnataka, on Saturday, May 30, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shailendra BhojakBy the time the court’s verdict was delivered last week, the SIR had resulted in the deletion of over 6 crore voters across 13 states and Union territories, with the roll revision now getting underway in the remaining states.The Election Commission is yet to provide any figures for illegal immigrants found in any of the 13 states and Union territories.Not aligned with the census?The formation of the high level committee also comes as the delayed decadal census, which was to take place in 2021, is now underway, 16 years after it was last conducted.Questions are also being raised about the commission’s findings, in the absence of census data, as only the census figures can provide clarity on whether there have been substantial changes in population composition, which can in turn lead to probing whether illegal immigration has taken place.“Ad hoc committees bypass permanent institutions like census operations and weaken institutions. How would you distinguish natural and unnatural without a baseline?” said K.K. Kailash, professor, department of political science at the University of Hyderabad.Muttreja said while the census is the most important foundation for any serious population analysis, it cannot alone identify illegal immigration.“That requires a separate, transparent methodology using multiple sources, which would include Census data, administrative records, border management data, local studies and independent demographic expertise. So the committee should not pre-empt the census. It should use the census as a core evidence base and build a credible methodology around it,” she said.Weaponising numbers and BJP’s changing narrativeSince the commission has been formed, Shah has said that the commission will study the “artificial demographic change” in the country.“The artificial change in population will be analysed and [the committee] will also formulate whether a law is needed. We will work to stop artificial demographic change,” he said in Gandhinagar on May 28.The BJP has made the bogey of illegal immigration its core campaign plank in successive state elections since 2024, including in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar.Even before the Supreme Court’s order last week, in which it said the Election Commission cannot be the final determiner of citizenship, BJP-led state governments have moved to reorder welfare beneficiaries on the basis of SIR deletions. BJP’s first chief minister in Bihar, Samrat Chaudhary, even said in April that 22 lakh ration cards had been cancelled following the exercise, while in neighbouring West Bengal, where too the BJP now has its first chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, the government announced that alleged infiltrators will be handed over to the Border Security Force instead of being produced in court.With the committee now studying “artificial increase” in population, any figure put out by it makes way for political use.“Numbers allow them to create alarm and manufacture urgency and maybe implement harsh emergency measures which wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” said Kailash.“It also creates space for the opposition, inadvertently. If the numbers are ‘high’, it means the Union government has failed to protect borders in the last 12 years.”In the last six years, the BJP has changed its narrative on India’s population. In 2019 and 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speeches spoke about “population explosion” and “population control” respectively, in his 2025 speech he announced a “High-powered Demography Mission”.Just the year before, in 2024, Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that “rising population growth and demographic changes pose challenges to the goals of ‘Viksit Bharat’ and proposed a high powered committee that was not formed till now. Modi himself had led the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign against “those who have more children” in the Hindi heartland, in an apparent reference to Muslims.The move to announce the demographic changes committee comes just weeks after the Modi government failed to get a constitutional amendment passed in Lok Sabha that would, contradictorily, reward states with higher populations.Ultimately, said the experts The Wire spoke to, India is facing major demographic challenges, but illegal immigration cannot be the sole lens to confront it. As Muttreja said:“India’s major demographic challenges are much wider. Most states are already below replacement-level fertility. Some states are aging rapidly. Internal migration is reshaping labour markets and cities. Rural and urban categories are becoming more complex, with many people living in rural areas but working in urban or peri-urban economies. Women’s education, employment, reproductive health, care work and social protection are all central to India’s demographic future.”“If demographic change is framed primarily through illegal immigration or religious and social imbalance, we risk missing the larger policy questions that will determine India’s development trajectory.”The article previously mentioned that the commission held its first meeting on Tuesday (May 2, 2026), this has been corrected and the piece has been republished at 8.24 pm on June 8, 2026.