C. Chandramouli, Registrar-general and census commissioner
Q: Can you elaborate on the importance of the decennial census?
A: India has been carrying out a regular census since 1872. And it’s been done throughout the country except on certain occasions when it wasn’t possible, as in 1981 in Assam and in 1991 in Jammu and Kashmir. Even during the freedom struggle, Gandhiji had called upon all Indians to participate in the census exercise. The census n

umbers form the basis for the programmes and policymaking of not only the government but of the private sector too. The empirical data is needed for any informed decision making. It gives you an unbiased snapshot of what’s happening in the country. When we do the housing census, for example, it gives you information on how many live in kucha houses, how many in pucca houses, how many have drinking water supply, how many have lighting, how many have access to the Internet, mobile phones, Internet facilities. In the same way — how many people speak what languages, what is their religion, what is their educational status, age profile, sex profile, etc. More than 150 countries conduct a census.

Q: Why is the census being conducted in different phases?
A: When we do the first phase, we have only a rough idea that there are these many houses and these many people that need to be covered. The first phase is the one involving house-listing. It was completed last year. In the household census, 30 crore households covering a billion plus population have been covered. The second phase kicks off on February 9 and ends on February 28. Each enumerator gets an equal load of 135 to 155 houses to cover. The work is supposed to be done by the enumerators in their free time, for which they are paid almost `10,000 as an honorarium. It’s an onerous task, getting into strange houses and asking a set of 29 questions. That’s why the enumerator is our mascot this time. It is the enumerators who get the work done.

Q: Can you give us an idea of the logistics involved?
A: We’ll be covering 640 districts, 5,961 sub-districts, 8,001 towns and 640,852 villages across the country. We’ve had to print 5.4 million instruction manuals in 18 languages and 340 million census schedules in 16 languages. Nearly 2.7 million enumerators and supervisors are among those trained.

Q: Why is a caste census being conducted separately later this year?
A: The government didn’t want the integrity of the census count to be affected by the caste census. Yes, there is doubling of work and use of resources owing to a separate caste census. But in the population count exercise, the questions are very basic and non-controversial.
In order that there is no chance for anybody to boost their numbers during the caste census, the government, after extensive deliberations by the Cabinet and a Group of Ministers, decided that a headcount would be done first and thereafter the caste census. Both the religion and the caste of an individual will be recorded during the caste census, which begins in June.

Q: Isn’t work on the National Population Register also on simultaneously? And what about confidentiality issues that are often raised?
A: There are two different exercises being carried out by the census office. The first is the making of the National Population Register. We collected information for the NPR using apparatus set up for the census. But the NPR is governed by a separate statute called the Citizenship Act. Data like permanent address, father’s name, mother’s name etc is for the NPR. That data is being digitised now and will be published in local areas after the collection of biometrics. After this, an NPR card will be issued. The census does not deal with individuals, only with aggregates. We reveal only aggregates.
For example, how many are literate and how many are illiterate, but we don’t reveal who is what. Census data is always kept confidential.

Q: Is the giving of a unique identification number (UID) to every Indian also part of the census work?
A: There are 15 distinct fields of data that deal with the identity of a person — among them the name, father’s name, mother’s name, age — which will be collected. We will then send the numbers to the UID Authority for the UID number, and then issue the NPR card.
The NPR card will carry the UID number. In that sense we are one of the registrars of the UID system. But UID won’t issue cards, it is the NPR which will issue the cards. NPR is a different operation — it is only using the machinery of the census to collect that information. But the NPR card and the UID number are two separate processes.

Q: Is this going to be a biometric census?
A: No. That’s incorrect. Biometrics and photographing of individuals is part of the NPR. We’ll be doing the work of taking the photographs and the biometrics in April once the population count is over. We will organise camps for people to come and get their photographs and biometrics done there.
A large portion of the data that the NPR collects is already there in electoral rolls, including your photograph. The extra bit would be fingerprints and the scanning of the iris. This was made mandatory in 2003 when the Citizenship Act was amended. The NPR is the first step towards having a Citizenship Register.

Q: It is only for the second time in the history of the census that the disabled will be counted. The first was in 2001. Are there any significant changes that you have introduced this time?
A: In the 2001 census, we had categorised disability only under five heads. This time there will be eight categories. We thus hope to get better and richer figures on the country’s disabled. We have trained our enumerators to tackle questions concerning disability. Some time ago, in Srinagar, despite the biting cold, the disabled came out onto the streets to say: “Count us”.

Q: What are some of the other notable categories introduced for this census?
A: In the schedule (questionnaire) for the census, transgenders are free to choose the “Others” category which has been introduced. In previous censuses, they were counted in the “male” category. We have also introduced separate codes for the separated and divorced. Of course, the enumerators won’t be asking if a couple is in a live-in relationship, as has been reported in some sections of the media. Prostitutes will come under the “Others” head in the work category and not under “beggars” as was the case earlier.

Q: What is the biggest challenge in the conduct of this gigantic exercise?
A: It is to see how we can bring down the omission rate of people who are to be counted to less than two per cent. There can be law and order problems, extremist problems etc. In 2001, we were forced to leave out a few hundred villages in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal owing to the Maoist problem. In the Sentinel Islands of Andaman and Nicobar, the primitive tribe living there is hostile and has directed arrows and spears at enumerators in the past. So here we merely videograph the population after drawing it out by throwing coconuts. The counting is then done after examining the recorded videos.

Q: A common complaint concerns delay in the availability of the final data that emerges from this exercise.
A: In the 2001 census, we had used the Intelligent Character Reader (ICR), which allows character recognition on schedules, and so 95 per cent of the data is scanned. This time around, we hope to scan 98 per cent, leaving only two per cent of it to be entered manually.
We hope to make the final data available within two years, as against the previous five to nine years. We expect the growth of population to come down from 21.5 per cent in the last census to 16 per cent in the 2011 census.