The Socio-Economic and Caste Census to be conducted from April 10 will be a paperless hi-tech affair for the first time, with the Union government sanctioning 20,000 tablet PCs to record the details collected from households across the state.
The 20,000 enumerators visiting houses in the state will be accompanied by an equal number of data entry operators trained by the Indian Telephone Industri-es, Palakkad, who will enter the details regarding the members of each household.
The tablet PCs are supplied by PSUs like BHEL and Electronics Cor-poration of India Limited (ECIL). The batteries of the PCs, once charged, will last for eight hours and the PCs will have a memory card to secure the data.
The details will be entered each day on the server set up at the offices of municipal corporations and at the level of the block panchayat. There will be provisions for recording, deletion/addition from the National Population Register, and also any migration of members of households to other places.
According to officials, there will be the provision for entering the transgender sex in the new pattern and for stating that a person is not interested in registering his/her caste. There will be provision to register serious diseases, but if people want confidentiality, it will be kept.
This is the first time after 1931 that information on a person’s caste is being taken in the SECS. In the present census, officers at various levels will make sure that there is no misreporting through special scrutiny at the grama sabha level after the census.