According to media reports, India is likely to begin conducting the long-delayed Census exercise and complete the survey within 18 months. So, realistically, the final Census report might be available sometime in late 2026 or in 2027, with a roughly 16-year gap since the last Census of 2011. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, is cited as the primary reason for the delay in the census.
As per a United Nations report, in the interim, India surpassed China in population. There have been significant changes in the demographics too. Hauz Khas, a posh neighbourhood in southern Delhi with affluent urbanites, was partly designated as rural in 2011, for example.
While many people are worried that India has been operating without proper data for a long time, in today’s world, there remains a significant discrepancy between reality and the data available, even for a decennial census. This discrepancy is especially noticeable as the decade-long gap draws to a close. In actuality, the decennial format of most censuses was merely a compulsion because conducting a census is a mammoth and prohibitively expensive undertaking.
It certainly makes sense that if census exercises were conducted more frequently, a number of policies and their execution as well as socioeconomic and health-related studies, might be dynamically adjusted by observing the findings.
An idea to pursue
For the past few years, this writer has personally supported “register-based” and “dynamic” censuses, which could furnish up-to-date census data whenever needed. The database would be updated continuously in real-time during a “dynamic” census. Reportedly, a few years ago, India was preparing software by which the birth date of a child will come into the back end of the database of the Census Register, and after attaining the age of 18 years, this person would be registered as a voter in the voter list from the Office of the Census Registrar. The name would be removed from the voter list upon death.
Global trends
This could be a significant leap in the direction of a dynamic database. However, India’s next Census, which will be the nation’s first “digital census”, may be a complete enumeration. On the other hand, a number of countries, including Austria, Bahrain, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greenland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland, are currently moving towards register-based censuses, which produce useful statistics primarily from government sources using data from various administrative registers, which includes population, tax, employment, school, hospital records, and data from municipalities.
These may be complemented by some well-planned small-scale sample surveys such as those conducted in Switzerland with 5%-10% of the population. Even the United States and the United Kingdom are moving towards register-based censuses. Unsurprisingly, such a census exercise will be cost-effective too. For instance, the cost of the 2001 Census in Austria was €72 million. However when the register-based approach was implemented in 2011, the cost fell to €10 million.
The United Kingdom government declared in 2014 that statistics derived from more frequent and timely administrative data will take the place of the decennial census after 2021. In place of the customary questionnaire-based approach, the U.K. will harvest the data people leave behind in their everyday lives. At the time, the Royal Statistical Society’s executive director said the U.K. government had “made the right call”. It is actually a “dynamic register-based census”, meaning that every pertinent social, economic, and demographic activity and event in people’s lives is constantly added to the census database.
Further, in order to produce its official figures, the Office for National Statistics in the U.K. has recently begun to gather more data — reliable data, of course — even from private companies. Examples of this include data collected from supermarket scanners and data on cars and trains from Auto Trader and the Rail Delivery Groups. Notably, India already has an Aadhaar-centric database, unlike the U.K.. And, reportedly, a few years back, the Home Minister asked officials to devise a strategy to merge the voter card, Aadhaar card, and other databases into the Census database.
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Database integration
However, combining many registers is never a simple operation. Even though it has been increasingly customary in India recently to integrate databases such as Aadhaar, PAN, voter ID, bank accounts, and mobile numbers, it is still a mammoth task to solve the jigsaw puzzle and to build up the “elephant” by correctly assembling different types of “registers”. However, I believe the nation has sufficient expertise to accomplish that. And, by using the administrative data of various available registers instead, thousands of crores of rupees can be saved.
A census serves as a valuable repository of data pertaining to various economic endeavours, educational attainment and literacy rates, housing and domestic facilities, urbanisation, migration, mortality, fertility, religion, language, and additional socio-economic, cultural, and demographic information. It is unclear if our intended method will be able to update data on the majority of these aspects in real time. Naturally, if any data is lacking, it can be updated on a regular basis by properly conducting surveys, perhaps on a small scale.
Overall, such an exercise might usher in an era of dynamic, continuous censuses. And the greatest legacy of digital India might be that, if it can be implemented. Let the upcoming Census be India’s last complete enumeration-based census.
Atanu Biswas is Professor of Statistics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
Published - September 10, 2024 12:08 am IST
