Timeline for Census

Pandemic postponement cannot last forever

Conducting the Census of India, into which has now been combined the National Population Register, was due to begin in March 2020 with the listing of houses, which is then followed by the population enumeration. But March 2020 was also the month that the pandemic hit and the country went into national lockdown. The Census was postponed indefinitely. Yet now that the country is largely open, it is reasonable to ask what the plans are for the Census. Recently it was reported that new methodologies were notified for the Census. They include self-enumeration —which is defined as “filling-up, completion and submission of [the] census schedule by respondents themselves”. The electronic submission of data has also been included. It is an open question as to how these changes will be implemented. The United States’ Census, which also operates on a decennial schedule and was similarly disrupted by the pandemic, shifted almost entirely online. While the US has greater digital penetration, it should be noted this shift was considered reasonably successful and many academics feel that a surprisingly small number of individuals found themselves left out. The Indian Census will have deeper problems to overcome, but it should seek to learn from examples of digital enumeration that have happened elsewhere in the world.
 

Several outstanding and politically sensitive issues remain. For one, the National Population Register is of course a deeply divisive subject, particularly in the period after the Citizenship Amendment Act, as it is seen as a step towards the National Register of Indian Citizens. While the protests have died down thanks to the pandemic, the government must keep in mind that they could easily spark again if there is any hint of a political or exclusionary bias in how the Census is being conducted. The Census should ideally be a neutral technocratic tool to understand demographic change, not an active instrument of state policy. Another major outstanding issue is the question of socio-economic and caste enumeration. It will be recalled that most political and judicial decisions that seek to address caste discrimination in India use Census data that is almost eight decades old. There has been constant pressure to revise this data, but the political disruption of sharp changes in the actual population composition might be so great that senior officials in the government appear to have ruled it out.

There is also a clear incentive for state governments to overstate the proportion of their residents in protected caste-related and economic categories in order to expand the amount of welfare spending that flows into their states. Dealing with these problematic incentives makes it particularly difficult for the Census to update its socio-economic and caste data. Finally, there are federal questions at stake. Some more prosperous states have already gone through their demographic transition; others are still in the process of doing so. New state-wise population proportion affects everything from the division of the common pool of taxes to the number of constituencies in Parliament. It is essential that the Census be completed with enough time for political deliberation before constituencies are once again delimited, or there will be even more pressure on the federal structure of the country. The government should issue a timeline for the Census as soon as possible so that some of these questions can be transparently discussed.