India's epic head count
My favourite story about counting India's people comes from the country's best-known demographer.
"Collecting accurate age data is one of the biggest problems in India," he said. "If you visit an Indian village, many men will overstate their age, thinking people will take them more seriously. On the other hand, women, as in many parts of the world, will understate their age, and say they are younger!"
So is our census data riddled with overage men and underaged women? I asked him, slightly alarmed. Mr Bose laughed. "Don't worry," he assured me. "We have enough technologies and methods at our disposal to correct these distortions."
That doesn't come as a surprise in a country of a billion-plus people which has its 15th census. Although China may have the biggest head count in the world, India, say demographers, carries out the most comprehensive census - it has been doing one regularly since 1872.
The logistics are mind-boggling and the process usually works without glitches. This time, more than two million enumerators and supervisors will visit over 240 million homes, 600,000 villages, 7,000 towns and 600 districts with questionnaires to carry out household listings followed by a census of the number of people in the country. The process will stretch over 11 months, consume more than 11 million tonnes of paper, and cost at least $1bn.
First comes the elaborate recording of information of homes, including assets people own - computers and mobile phones have been added this time. It's an invaluable database of the purchasing power and habits of Indians. After that the enumerators will fan out across the country with the census questionnaire, where smaller, but vital questions will be asked - name, age, citizenship and occupation are some of them.
Policy makers and pundits will keenly await the results of this epic census and answers to some of India's most intriguing demographic questions.
Will northern states, for example, continue to be major contributors to India's population growth? India's fertility rate has dropped by just 40% in the past three decades despite southern India's having reached "replacement fertility" rate, demographers say. Ashish Bose reckons that the northern states' share of population growth between 2001 and 2026 will be around 50%, while in the south it will be around 12.6%.
This will translate into a demographic dividend as northern India will stay young, while the south faces rapid ageing. By 2025, demographers say, India's population will still be very young, with a median age of 26. But the median age in the south would be around 34 - similar to Europe in the late 1980s, they say.
There are some quibbles though. Many have demanded that the census should also find out about caste, the complex social order which assigned people a place in the social hierarchy based on their occupation. After all, they say, many affirmative action programmes in India are targeted at caste-based groups, and a proper enumeration of caste will help government to direct such programmes to the deserving more smoothly.
But demographers like Ashish Bose have opposed this. "People can easily lie about their caste status. If an upper-caste respondent finds that declaring himself lower-caste will get him government goodies, he can drop his surname or change his name and commit fraud," he says. The other problem is that census enumerators have no right to counter a respondent's reply; and thus such fraud could go unchecked. So the jury is still out on whether caste should make a comeback - only once, in 1931, was caste included in the census.
With or without the inclusion of caste, the census remains an Indian achievement of epic proportions. There is little doubt about that.
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