Cabinet approval for new Census dates including NPR expected soon

Within a few weeks from now, the home ministry will approach the Union Cabinet again, to get fresh approvals on dates to conduct the delayed Census of Indian population. The dates being considered are likely to somewhat delay the crucial population count later in calendar year 2022. The approvals for doing the exercise in 2021 have run out. 

As the count of numbers pan-India will be digital this time, while the last Census took about a month to finally tally the results, it will be much faster to get the initial results. Population enumeration is usually done within a month. For Census 2021, the Cabinet had set February 9-28 as the operative terminal dates. Since the more elaborate House listing and Housing Census, which precedes it and takes about six months, has not begun so far, the actual count will be pushed back to later in 2022. The critical shortage at the office of Registrar General and Census Commissioner (OGRI) is that of enumeration staff. The budget for the exercise was estimated at Rs 12,700 crore. The number of people needed to carry it out, mostly school teachers at the junior level, is three million. It was 2.8 million the last time. The almost flat numbers reflect the confidence of the OGRI that digital counting will make the process less tedious and time consuming and also interfere less with the school duties of the teachers.  

As of now, there are only two certainties in the census operations. The President of India shall be the first person to be enumerated in the headcount of all Indians. It has been so since the 1951 census. The second is that the census will be coterminous with the work of populating the National Population Register (NPR), except in Assam. 

“We have also included provision in the Census data for yearly projection of the population till 2030”, said a senior government official. Some states have updated their websites to include the scope for revising the numbers yearly. 

The approval for the Census by the union cabinet in December 2019 had laid down clear timelines. The house listing was to happen in April to September 2020 and the population count in February 2021.The OGRI counted the number of Indians and used to release the results once every ten year. With the NPR as the basis to create a dynamic register of the “usual residents of the country”, this practice shall become obsolete with this census giving the government the ability to keep the data updated regularly. The NPR was begun in 2010 and updated only once since then in 2015, seeding it with Aadhaar. It has, however, attracted controversy. 

Digital Census: 

India is not the first one to use digital technology to count its numbers. But it will certainly be the biggest such exercise. Within the Census staff, the prospect of using digital means to count the population has gone down well. “The logistical challenge of printing the tabulated sheets and delivering those to all districts of India was a logistical nightmare,” Dr C Chandramouli, former Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India had remarked in a session on the lessons from the 2011 Census. Estimating quantities of material to be sent including the right language mix, getting it delivered and then ensuring all those tonnes of material flew back to the Census Commissioner’s office in time left the officials dazed. The tablet is so much better.

While mobile applications for the collection of data and a portal for management and monitoring of various census related activities have been developed, the field work for house listing has not been possible so far because of the repeated waves of Covid-19. The home ministry has begun to fill the senior level appointments since August this year. In a huge rush of orders by the ministry, vacant positions of the director of census operations in states ranging from large ones like Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh as well as smaller states and union territories like Mizoram, Andaman & Nicobar islands were filled in. Corresponding vacancies in the headquarters in the ministry have also got filled up. A large percentage of the staff trained in 2019 and 2020 have since moved on and will need fresh training to begin work anew. The master trainers themselves number about 55,000. 

In the 2011 census the operations were hugely reliant on bar code based scanning. That ensured the data was processed fast. A decade later the officials are happy with the march of technology. Compared to the 29 questions asked by the enumerators who visit each house, they shall be asking two more this time at 31. But this will not include questions on caste except on scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The ministry of electronics and information technology has developed a module Census-as-a-service (CaaS) that will house all sorts of population data to the ministries as a clean, machine-readable and actionable format of data. There are plans to make CaaS as a special purpose vehicle which will also offer metadata to non-government agencies in the future. 

Don't argue: 

In the house listing operations, all buildings and structures, residential, partly residential or non-residential are identified and listed and the uses to which they were put recorded. Information on houses, household amenities and assets were also collected. In the second phase of population enumeration, more detailed information on each individual residing in the country, Indian national or otherwise, during the enumeration period is collected. There are quirks in the method employed. For instance, while all the religions get a code, those declaring no religion are recorded but without a code. Similarly, to avoid duplication, the totals are progressively clubbed from the enumerator’s sheets to the state level data within a fortnight But the countrywide data is re-verified by the ORGI and then released after checking for a month.  

Based on the data collected, the 2011 census provided housing census results within one year, the final population census results in 18 months and all other major results within 2 years of completing the census operations. For the 2021 census, most of the data shall be up and visible in 2022 itself. Talking in his presentation about the earlier editions, Chandramouli had also pointed to the “widespread apathy among the population which translates into non-cooperation by respondents” which is also added on to by the inadequate capacity building among the short term staff hired for the purpose. Taking note of it the pay for the enumerators and the first level supervisors has been ramped up to Rs 25,000. The district level officers shall be paid anywhere between Rs 45,000 and Rs 60,000.The money for this vast army shall be deposited in banks through PFMS to avoid corruption risks. And in their training the enumerators are given written instructions, never argue, instead write down the data just as she is told. 

A quick look at the 2021 Census 

• It is 16th Census of India
• Gazette notification for Census issued in 2020, to be reissued
• Target to get digitised data from enumerators
• Definition of urban areas kept unchanged from 2011 to allow easy comparison 
• Central Monitoring and Management System web portal created to guide operation

Training Cascade:

• 100 National Trainers
• 1,800 Maser Trainers
• 43,500 Field Trainers
• 3 million enumerators, mostly teachers, clerks or other government employees
• Maximum period of deployment of staff for 18 months
• Honorarium for all staff to be directly credited to bank accounts