Will 1 billion people please stand up

“India has held Censuses uninterruptedly since 1872,every 10 years,through the freedom struggle,Partition,wars,floods,earthquakes and Independence,” says C. Chandramouli,Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.

Even Great Britain,where the Census began in 1801,stopped its Census operation during World War II. But in India,the headcount went on. What makes Census 2011 different from the 14 others before it is the exercise to build the National Population Register (NPR),a database of every single resident of India.

For the first time,the NPR (one of the principal sources of data that will be used by Nandan Nilekani’s Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to issue identity numbers to every Indian) will be tagged along with the Census exercise. So apart from the Census questionnaire,all of us will have to fill up an NPR form that will ask for individual details—your name,your father’s name,mother’s name,educational qualifications,and more.

How’s that different from what the Census was already doing?

The difference,like everyone associated with the exercise takes great pains to explain,is in the way the individual is seen. While the Census only asks for the head of the family and asks him/her for a count of family members,the NPR seeks details of every individual in the country. “The Census is a purely statistical exercise while the NPR involves individual data collection. So the Census would want to know how many people in a village are literate,not if Sita Devi is literate or Kamala Devi is literate. That’s part of the NPR data,” says Varsha Joshi,Director of Census Operations,Delhi.

THE EXERCISE

At Gopsons Papers Ltd in Noida’s Sector 64,five high-end printing machines are working overtime,rolling out 700 pink and yellow forms every minute. Today,Wednesday,is a holiday for Ram Navmi,but the 45-odd people working on the Census forms have a deadline to meet. The first phase of the Census rolls out in West Bengal,Assam,Andaman and Nicobar Islands,Goa,Meghalaya and the NDMC areas of Delhi on April 1 and the forms have to be ready by then.

The Census is conducted in two phases. Phase I,that starts on April 1 this year and will go on till all the states are covered in September,is called ‘houselisting’,when an army of enumerators (the Census foot soldiers) will fan out across the length and breadth of the country armed with stacks of forms—yellow for houselisting and pink for NPR. Each enumerator has to cover around 150 houses in 45 days,beginning with identifying every house in the country,whether it’s that single-room hovel in Delhi’s Dakshinpuri or a tribal settlement in a Naxal hotbed.

No mean task; so the enumerators,all government school teachers,go through training sessions. It’s 9.30 a.m. and 54 enumerators and their 18 supervisors have turned up for the first day of their three-day training session at the NP Bengali Senior Secondary School,Gole Market. S.K. Bhardwaj,a trainer and a supervisor,addresses a group of enumerators,talking to them about using GIS maps and GPS to track down homes. “Also remember to use Google maps. I do that all the time,” he tells the group. The Census exercise will be flagged off on April 1 with a team of enumerators visiting the President,Pratibha Patil.

The houselisting form has 35 columns relating to building material,if it is kuccha or pucca,is electrified,has toilets,if the household has television,refrigerator and so on. The NPR asks for your name,relationship to the head of the family,father’s name,mother’s name,spouse’s name,sex,date of birth,marital status,nationality (it doesn’t ask for proof of nationality and takes your word for it),how long you have stayed in the present address and how long you intend to stay here.

After the forms,designed by the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad,are filled,they are scanned and the images processed using ICR technology. “No other country uses such sophisticated technology to process its Census data,” says Chandramouli.

Once the scanned NPR forms are digitised,teams are sent out to collect photographs and fingerprints of all residents,aged 15 and above. The NPR data is then sent to the Nilekani-headed UIDAI,which will assign a unique ID number to each resident after checking the biometric data for duplication.

In the second phase,from February 9 to 28,2011,the Census does a count of people,known as population enumeration. The results are declared after the Census and NPR data go to the Census Commissioner.

This is where all the data finally lands,the story of India told in numbers. Population,sex ratio,literacy,religion,languages spoken,the number of SCs and STs,water and electricity connections—numbers that come out of every district,tehsil and village in the country. This is the data that builds the country,the Planning Commission needs these statistics for economic and social planning,researchers and demographers dig into this databank for their scientific analyses and states are allocated funds on the basis of what the Census says.

Which is why this grand idea of Census has survived a century-and-a-half in India. “The Census can’t be replaced. A lot of smaller developed countries,especially the Nordic nations,have stopped their Censuses and rely on a record-based data system—birth and death registration and immigration records. But in India,we can’t do that yet because birth and death registration is a low 60 to 62 per cent. The only way we can get any reliable data is through the Census,” says Pronab Sen,Chief Statistician of India.

THE ISSUES

Over the years,the Census has run into divided sensibilities. One of the demands for Census 2011 was for caste as one of the parameters,an argument led by those seeking a count of OBCs. The last time a caste-based Census was done was in 1931 and the practice was discontinued because of fear that questions on caste would be a strain on the country’s social fabric.

“Caste is a complex issue,but the Census collects data on other complex issues,so why not caste? This lack of information (on castes) is only helping the worst people on both sides of the debate—those making inflated claims and those who are blind to the reality of caste as an issue in India,” says Satish Deshpande,professor of sociology,Delhi School of Economics.

Ashish Bose,demographer and the man who coined the term ‘Bimaru’ in the context of the economic condition of states in the Hindi heartland,says it’s time the Census stopped being status-quoist. “While I am proud that this is the largest Census operation in the world,we collect almost the same data that we collected 100 years ago. For instance,the Census doesn’t ask direct questions on income. The income of India’s population is inferred from whether they own a ration card,refrigerator and so on. Also,the housing Census shouldn’t be part of the population count. That’s something the Ministry of Housing should do. And then,the data should be disseminated fast. What is the point if the data of 2001 comes out now? And it’s still coming,even as we prepare for Census 2011,” Bose says.

But at the Census office in Delhi,Commissioner Chandramouli has a job on his hands and won’t be drawn into debates: “The Census is a dispassionate agency. It is a guide to how far you have come and helps you review the past,take stock of the present and plan for the future.”