Census 1921 vs 2021: Capturing pandemic data, from Spanish Flu to Covid-19

There is no clarity on when the decadal Census 2021 operation will be complete, though the development of digital applications for data collection offers hope the work may pick up pace once begun.

Census 2021: On March 25, 2020, weeks after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nationwide was lockdown, the Centre decided to postpone one of the biggest data collection exercises in the world--India’s decadal population Census.

Till that day, only one person had died of Covid-19 in India, according to official data from the health ministry. Today, while the recorded Covid-19 deaths have crossed 400,000, the real toll could be higher, as the cause of only one in five deaths gets officially registered in the country.

The actual plan of the Registrar General