In what can only be a case of muddying the waters, the Union government is reportedly mulling the expansion of data collection in the long-delayed Census to include caste enumeration. That caste may be one of the variables in the Census could be an outcome of the strident demand for a caste census by several political parties. But considering the incomplete and poorly constructed nature of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011, which resulted in data that were unwieldy, inaccurate, and hence unusable, the government must not hurry into utilising the office of the Registrar General and other agencies to tabulate caste. There must first be a definite time frame to conduct the Census on a war footing. If the delay is deliberate, in order to allow for delimitation to be conducted first in 2026, this will be harmful not just to public policy but also to relations with States. As of June 2024, out of 233 countries, India was one of 44 not to have conducted the Census this decade. The ostensible reason provided by the Union Home Ministry was delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but 143 other countries conducted the Census after March 2020, which marked the onset of the pandemic. India shares this dubious distinction of not having a Census with countries affected by conflict, economic crises or turmoil such as Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Sri Lanka and in sub-Saharan Africa.
There remains little excuse to continually delay the decennial Census, an exercise that has been conducted without fail from 1881 to 2011. Yet, the deadline to freeze administrative boundaries of districts, tehsils, towns and municipal bodies — a prerequisite before the conduct of the Census — lapsed on June 30 this year. This deadline has been extended 10 times since 2019. Several public schemes such as the National Food Security Act, the National Social Assistance Programme and the delimitation of constituencies are dependent upon the Census being conducted. Besides, statistical surveys that go into setting policy such as those related to household and social consumption, the National Family Health Survey, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, and the Sample Registration System, among others, use the Census to set their sampling frames. With the 2011 Census data getting increasingly out-dated and phenomena such as migration across and within States, the urbanisation of Indian societies, and the suburbanisation of cities becoming increasingly prominent in recent years, the lack of a Census is telling. The reliance on a bevy of sample surveys to fill in the gap is only resulting in debates over methodology and conclusions based on cherry-picking according to one’s political choice. Clearly, the Union government must stop being derelict in its duties and should proceed with the Census quickly.
