How India put 1.21 bn people on record

The largest-ever census in the second-most populous country of the world was undertaken from February 9 to 28. Business Standard has a bird’s-eye view of the exercise.

Gujarat’s urban population has risen from 37 per cent in 2001 to 43 per cent in 2011, while 86.3 per cent of Delhi’s population in literate now, compared to 81.6 per cent a decade ago. While girl children are more enthusiastically welcomed in Nagaland and Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Haryana are grappling with skewed sex ratios. These and many more data were thrown up by the largest-ever census exercise undertaken from February 9 to 28 across the country. The task of chronicling the details of approximately 1.21 billion citizens — across 641,000 villages, 7,936 towns, 5,924 sub-districts and 640 districts in 35 states and Union Territories of the country — has not been easy and has seen quite a few bottlenecks.

ORISSA: MANY LEFT OUT
In Orissa, a rather belated beginning of awareness campaigns, lack of active involvement of political fraternity and the media, alleged official discrepancies in estimating the population of disabled and migrant people and overwhelmingly banking on the already overburdened school teachers for the enumeration work took some sheen off the exercise.

Despite all-out efforts made by the census authorities in reaching out to the 9.7 million-odd households in the state and the migrant population settled in other states, non-government organisations (NGOs) involved in the exercise felt many might still have been left out of the exercise.

“The awareness campaign for the census began only one-and-a-half months before the exercise, while it should ideally have begun a year earlier. Despite all our efforts, we don’t think we have been able to cover all households in the state. Moreover, the campaign should have been made more vigorous and the thrust of the campaign should have been on making people aware of the significance of the census exercise,” said Madhumita Ray, programme manager (Orissa), Action Aid, an international NGO roped in to spread awareness about the census operations.

The NGO also pointed out that many migrants from the state might have been left out of the enumeration exercise.

The census authorities had identified only 800,000 migrant workers from Orissa settled elsewhere in the country, but we believe their number could be in the range of 3-4 million, said Ray.

Besides, the responsibility of the census exercise was given largely to school teachers, already burdened with the process of enumeration of BPL (Below Poverty Line) families, without any additional incentive, she added.

The census authorities, on the other hand, claimed that this year’s exercise was the most comprehensive ever, covering the entire population.

“This year’s census was very comprehensive and thorough, as the ground work for the operations had started nearly four years back. We don’t think anybody was left out of the enumeration work. Special care was taken to ensure that the migrant workers, the disabled population and even eunuchs were included in the process”, Bishnupada Sethi, director, Directorate of Census Operations, told Business Standard.

To ensure that nobody was left out, a statewide awareness campaign was launched, Sethi said. This included staging of street plays, organising workshops and seminars, distributing publicity materials in the remotest of villages and roping in NGOs to reach out to disabled and migrant workers. Even, a 24x7 call centre was set up to address complaints of the people, he added.

Sethi said around 700 complaints were received from people who were not included in the enumeration work, adding quickly that these complaints were sorted out immediately.

Over 100,000 enumerators were deployed in the state — 99 per cent of them school teachers and the rest government employees and anganwadi workers.

GUJARAT: 800 COMPLAINTS
The census enumeration exercise in Gujarat this time has been a lot better than the previous times, the credit for which goes to a call centre based out of Pune. In spite of over 150,000 enumerators and supervisors, the Directorate of Census Operations in the state saw close to 800 complaints of non-enumeration.

“Facility of the call centre this time has helped the overall enumeration process in Gujarat. Even as the process began on February 9, 2011, we started receiving intimation of non-enumeration complaints from the Pune call centre. However, the directorate waited till the enumeration got completed before addressing these complaints,” said a census official.

Once over, further “prompt” enumeration was conducted to address the complaints.

“Since we had not finalised the calculations yet, complaints were addressed promptly. We covered close to 800 complaints in a couple of days,” said the official, adding that the DCO had still been receiving stray complaints, which it hoped to address soon.

According to Manish Bharadwaj, Director of Census (Gujarat), the department has roped in only school teachers “in keeping with the Census Act”. “We have not outsourced the process to anyone else other than school teachers, since the Act so requires. Moreover, there have been no hindrances seen in the process, since over 150,000 teachers and supervisors were involved in the process in Gujarat,” Bharadwaj added.

UP: A GIANT EXERCISE
Census was a mammoth task in Uttar Pradesh, with over 3,75,000 enumerators and supervisors engaged in the process. Their honorarium alone touched Rs 125 crore.

The scale of the task could be easily gauged from by the fact that Uttar Pradesh is home to a sixth of India’s villages. But the state census directorate in Lucknow is confident that the census covered the entire population in UP.

“We had widely publicised the census exercise in the media and even launched a helpline to enable the general public to lodge any complaint of being left out. We did receive complaints, which were promptly forwarded to district officials concerned for resolution,” Director of Census Operations in UP Neena Sharma told Business Standard.

Besides, the directorate had undertaken a special drive to enumerate homeless people on the night of February 28, with Sharma personally supervising the operation in Lucknow.

KARNATAKA: SMOOTH, DESPITE STAFF CRUNCH
The hotline set up at the census director’s office in Bangalore received 636 complaints from Bangalore alone. The director has had the highest number of complaints from the sprawling city, which has grown leaps and bounds since last census.

The development may have happened, but these places have no government or corporation schools. This only made the life of the census director all the more difficult. The authorities had had to rope in employees of aided schools for the enumeration exercise. In addition, many contract employees of various government departments were also involved in the process.

Amid reports from various sections that people had been left out, the state director of census operations seems an unruffled man, with the census operations being nearly smooth across the state. “We have had few complaints from rural areas. It has been most problematic in Bangalore,” said T K Anil Kumar, director of census operations.

With census being the work of the state government, it was the state government machinery that was put into use to get the job done. Some 104,000 enumerators and 17,000 supervisors were involved in the operations. Bangalore saw the biggest operation, with 17,000 enumerators being involved to cover an area of 727 sq km.

TAMIL NADU: WORK OUTSOURCED
In Tamil Nadu, around 150,000 school teachers and government employees were assigned for census data collection and compilation. These were 120,000 enumerators, 20,000 supervisors and the rest reserve staff. The data collection was completed on March 5, 2011, and the enumeration documents were sent to the scanning centre in Pallavaram, Chennai.

It would take around six months to complete the scanning, considering the size of documents to be scanned. The complete output on national statistics would be available only by mid- or late-2012.

An honorary token payment of around Rs 3,500 was given to each enumerator for the work done over 20 days from February 9 to 28. Each enumerator had a target to cover 700-800 people or 150-200 houses.

Scanning and printing work of the data was outsourcing in the state. Kodak provided printing machines and a major share of the data was scanned by HCL. The decision to outsource scanning was taken by the head office of census directorate, New Delhi.

PUNJAB, HARYANA: MARGIN OF ERROR
No outsourcing of work is said to have taken place in the census exercise in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh. Only school teachers and government officials were deployed to conduct the exercise. According to estimates, over 50,000 enumerators each were deployed in Punjab and Haryana, while 3,000 enumerators undertook the exercise in Chandigarh.
 

SOME FACTS ABOUT CENSUS 2011
Total cost	Rs 2,200 cr
Cost per person	Rs 18.19
Number of census functionaries	2.7 Mn
Number of languages in which schedules were canvassed	16
Number of languages in which training  manuals were prepared	18
Number of schedules printed	340 mn
Number of training manuals printed	5.4 mn
Paper utilised	8,000 mt
Materials moved	10,500 mt
POPULATION 2001-2011
	2001	2011	Difference	% Growth 2001-11
Persons	1,028,737,436	1,210,193,422	181,455,986	17.64
Males	532,223,090	623,724,248	91,501,158	17.19
Females	496,514,346	586,469,174	89,954,828	18.12
Source: censusindia.gov.in

The government officials maintain that enough steps had been taken to ensure that no person was left out, but marginal chances of omission and duplication exist.

To further ensure that the date collected by enumerators is factual, post-enumeration surveys are conducted, wherein a few sample blocks are chosen and new enumerators are assigned to verify the facts already collected.

Inputs from Jayajit Dash, Kalpesh Damor, Virendra Singh Rawat, Praveen Bose, Gireesh Babu and Vikas Sharma