Opinion Identikit politics

The Indian Census is reputed to be the world’s biggest administrative exercise but this day next week, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation will attempt to set another record, for the fastest census-like exercise ever. It will deploy four lakh government employees to gather data indicating the economic status of over one crore people in perhaps 20 lakh households in a single day. Detractors have protested that the required manpower cannot be mobilised at short notice, and that properly authenticated data cannot be generated within the deadline. That’s one problem.

Far more troubling is the controversy over labelling by nativity that the proposed survey has raised. Nestling among innocuous questions about electricity and gas connections and bank accounts are three queries that can be read to be designed to divide, asking about the canvassed person’s state of origin, mother tongue and date of arrival in Telangana. This may not be a serious issue in rural parts but Hyderabad, like other large cities, is home to large populations that have moved in from other states. Here, this would serve as a reminder of the divide which the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) had leveraged to undo the 1956 amalgamation of Andhra Pradesh. It was a positive development, asserted the identity of the people of one of its constituent regions, and it affirmed their right to self-determination. But the forthcoming household survey skates too close to profiling. It addresses the right of immigrants from other states to be counted as equal citizens.

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Two months after its formation, Telangana still appears to be a work in progress. It remains engaged in running squabbles with Andhra Pradesh over who owns what. Most recently, an agricultural university and a veterinary university were split down the middle. Meanwhile, Chief Minister Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao has gone head to head with the Centre, which has invested the governor with special powers, and is trying to escalate the matter into a Centre-state battle by involving other chief ministers. The newest state could have avoided yet another controversy simply by deleting three questions from the household survey, which was designed to target beneficiaries of subsidies, pensions and fee reimbursement more accurately than the 2011 Census data permits. But discrimination on the basis of nativity or domiciliary status impugns the fundamental right to reside anywhere in India, with all the privileges of a citizen, including benefits and subsidies, implied. Beyond the miasma of suspicion, Telangana’s survey highlights a developing problem: how can states deliver subsidies equitably to an increasingly mobile population?