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.
