“You count, therefore we count”. With this pithy yet catchy motto, the largest-ever headcount exercise in the world kicks off across India on Wednesday, February 9 — the mammoth task of enumerating the population of a country that boasts of well over a billion people.

Around 2.7 million enumerators will begin to fan out across vast swathes of India to cover a mind-boggling 240 million households over three weeks. By the end of the epic exercise, on February 28, the office of the registrar-general and census commissioner will have collected a wealth of information on the country’s demographic profile, detailing among other things
various socio-economic indicators which over decades has helped shape both government and private sector policies.
Conducted since 1872, the 2011 census is the 15th in the series, says the registrar-general and census commissioner, Dr C. Chandramouli. The breathtaking size of this decennial exercise is also revealed when Dr Chandramouli shares details of the kind of coverage the census involves. “We’ll be covering 640 districts, 5,961 sub-districts, 8,001 towns and 640,852 villages across the country,” he says. The headcount is based on the household census, conducted last year, which provides the framework for population enumeration.
The more prickly issue of a caste census — it was last done in 1932 — has, however, been left for later in the year. It is being planned as a separate exercise, and is likely to be conducted between June and September 2011. The separation was because the government wanted to ensure that the “integrity” of numbers in the main census affected due to controversies over the caste census, Dr Chandramouli indicated.
Running alongside the population enumeration exercise will be yet another daunting but important task — preparation of the National Population Register (NPR). It is for the first time in the country that this work is being undertaken, Dr Chandramoli says. It will entail listing of the “usual residents of the country, regardless of nationality”. When the exercise is completed, each individual will be issued an NPR card, Dr Chandramouli says.
Besides such details as name, date of birth, address, etc for the NPR to be collected during the population enumeration exercise for a “comprehensive identity database”, NPR’s preparation will also involve the collection of biometrics (photograph, fingerprints and iris scan) for all those aged 15 years and above. Data collection for the NPR will be followed by the issuance of an UID number for each individual in the country, which will then be printed on the NPR card.
The population enumeration exercise (census) alone will cost the exchequer at least `2,200 crores. While this might seem a huge amount, given that it’s meant to cover a billion-plus people it works out to around `18.33 for each person in the country to be counted.
With better technology available, the census office is also hopeful that it will be able to collate and put in the public domain the data it collects during the census. Allaying fears of any breach of confidentiality on the personal data that is collected, Dr Chandramouli clarifies that it’s only the “aggregates” of findings that are shared with everyone, and not any personal information regarding individuals.