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No census before 2024 elections?

ByHT Editorial
Jan 06, 2023 08:26 PM IST

Yet another delay signals that the census won’t be complete by 2024. This is unfortunate, and will inflict collateral damage on policy and data

HT reported on January 6 that the office of the Registrar General of India (RGI) has informed state and Union Territories that the deadline for freezing administrative boundaries of administrative jurisdictions has been extended till June 30. According to the rules, the census exercise can only begin three months after the freezing of administrative boundaries which makes the earliest possible date for commencing the census September 30, 2023. When read with the fact that the RGI hasn’t even completed the house listing process — it is the first stage of the census and was originally supposed to be completed by September 2020 — this means that the final census will not be completed by 2024.

That the census has been delayed under a government which takes pride in having increased state capacity and improved India’s international standing is ironic. (HT Photo) PREMIUM
That the census has been delayed under a government which takes pride in having increased state capacity and improved India’s international standing is ironic. (HT Photo)

It is very likely that the exercise will suffer an even bigger delay. The reason is not very difficult to explain. The period after September 2023 will basically be occupied with elections, first in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (end of this year) and then the 2024 general elections, the process for which will start from March 2024. Given the fact that the grassroots operations for both elections and an exercise like the census use similar human resources such as schoolteachers, it is extremely unlikely that the census operations will be held simultaneously with the election cycle which will commence from late 2023 onwards.

The fact that India’s decadal census has been delayed by at least four years now — this has never happened in history — is extremely distressing. The census is not just a head count of people, and, therefore, substitutable by things such as Aadhaar registrations, as some people like to claim. Given the scientific rigour with which it is conducted and the data it collects along with a simple head count of people, the census is the basic building block of any statistical exercise in the country. Everything, from designing of other government surveys to welfare programmes draws on the existing wisdom of the census. A delayed census, therefore, also means blinded policy and paralysed research which is the essential companion to effective policy and its healthy criticism in a democratic society.

That the census has been delayed under a government which takes pride in having increased state capacity and improved India’s international standing is ironical. Many smaller counties including in the South Asian region have conducted their census in the post-pandemic period.

An obvious question is whether the delay is due to political factors. At least two of them are not very difficult to see. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s rhetoric on the issue of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) circa 2019, created paranoia especially among religious minorities about any enumeration exercise being a ploy to snatch their citizenship. And recent demands for clubbing a caste census with the decadal census have made any decision on the latter fraught with political messaging.

Whatever the motives and the constraints, the collateral damage of the census being delayed, has been immense.

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