It's the 2001 Face Odyssey. The fourteenth Indian census, one of the largest administrative exercises in the world, will soon begin to trace the contours of a nation called India. Falling as it will in a period when an old century and millennium has yielded place to the new, it cannot but be a way of reading the failures and successes of the Indian state, both before and after independence.For the British Raj, the census operation was part of the politics of domination and rule. It was about 140 years ago when the Raj's drummers in the numerous towns and villages of the country announced the advent of the census enumerator for the first time in history. Like Wee Willie Winkie, he visited people at night in those days, and families were urged to chain their dogs and keep lanterns at the window in preparation for his arrival. Benedict Anderson, the British-born historian of Southeast Asia, defined the census as one of the three institutions of power of the colonial state, the other two being the map and themuseum. As he put it in his book, Imagined Communities: ``Together they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its domination - the nature of human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.''It was a theme that political scientist Sudipta Kaviraj was to take a step further. For him, the census was part of the process of ``colonial modernity''. He argues that it was through census enumeration, that ``mapped and counted identities'', as against ``fuzzy'' ones, came into being. Concepts like ``majority'' and ``minorities'' were the natural outcome of such an exercise.The process that Kaviraj talks about is still in many ways a continuing one to this day. But the census operations in post-independent India also witnessed a shift in its vantage point. It was not ``them'' who were being counted and analysed, it was ``us''. Data culled for the project of domination has necessarily to be distinguished from that collected for the project ofnational development, even though there may not be unanimity in what constitutes such development.The five census operations that post-independent India conducted had several stories to tell. For one thing, population growth figures revealed the way various regions in the country inhabited different time zones: Tamil Nadu and Kerala, at one end of the spectrum, has achieved replacement levels of fertility, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, at the other, could take another 100 years to do so. Then take infant mortality levels in tribal districts. They indicated how tribal communities in this country are experiencing nothing short of a social haemorrhage, with loss of land and access to forests resulting in a people being steadily denied their dignity and way of life.One of the biggest whodunits of the 1991 census figures was the mysterious disappearance of millions of women into the great unknown. In 1901, there were supposedly 1,072 women for every 1,000 men in the country. Ninety years later, the figure hadfallen to 929, with states like MP, UP, Haryana and Rajasthan forming an almost unbroken belt where the sex-ratio was below 850.It is by turning the torch on these problem areas that the census operation can, at its best, become a potent critique of state policy and a template for future strategies of change. But it cannot perform this function if it is just a mechanical exercise in counting heads. To be relevant, it has to be sensitive to social reality. The 1991 census was conducted under the shadow of the mounting environmental crisis and information on the kind of cooking fuel used within the household was elicited for the first time.Another significant alteration made concerned the definition of literacy, which could not quite be gauged from the number of years a person spent at school. For the purposes of the census, a literate person came to be one who can read and write ``with understanding''. Similarly, the definition of women's work was refined. This was provoked largely by the grossunderestimation of women's participation in the work force - the 1981 census had actually held that women constituted only 16.5 per cent of the total work force! The problem lay in how ``work'' was being seen - at that point of time, even seasonal agricultural labour performed by women was not taken into account. Enumerators in 1991 were therefore specifically asked to classify as ``work'', any service of a productive nature, even if it was not given monetary value. The result was startling: there was a 42 per cent increase in the female work force between 1981 and '91!As for the future, there are numerous areas that require closer scrutiny. But, clearly, one of the biggest themes of the next census will be urbanisation, because that's where a great deal of the action is going to be since at least a third of the country's total population now lives in cities. Surprisingly, the 1991 census indicated a slow down in urban growth levels. While, urban growth was put at 46 per cent in 1971, it had come down to36 per cent by 1981, only to decline by another 10 per cent in 1991.But a closer look at the figures indicate that while megacities like Mumbai and Delhi had grown at very rapid rates, medium and small towns did not quite keep pace. Something like 65 per cent of urban India - some 218 million - lived in 300 cities with a population of a lakh and above. Half this number lived in the 23 one-million plus cities and half of that, in the four metros of Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta and Chennai.Now it's the story of what happened to urbanisation after 1991 that the nation awaits. What changes did liberalisation bring in its wake? Did it increase urban growth in any way? And, if so, has that spread been even, or have only the larger cities continued to grow in a monstrous manner? Our burgeoning cities reveal more than just urban growth, they reflect life in the great rural hinterland as well, since migration to the big city is often from rural or semi-rural environs. So what causes people in modern India to leavethe land of their birth? Which are the regions they leave and where do they go? And what does all this say about India's growth strategies? We would need to wait for the next census before we can even begin to understand this complex process.In these uncertain times, when community is pitted against community, and visceral hatreds of every kind are being stoked for petty political ends, the great millennial head count should serve as a reminder of the numerous unfinished tasks of bringing a better life to the millions that make up India.
