India yesterday launched the task of counting its teeming billion-plus population, with 2.5 million people set to fan out over the south Asian giant to begin work for the 2011 census.
The exercise has formidable challenges — coverage of a vast geographical area, left-wing rebels and separatists, widespread illiteracy, and people with a bewildering diversity of cultures, languages and customs.
“The census is a means of evaluating once in every 10 years, in a dispassionate manner, whether government programs are reaching their intended target and plan for the future,” Census commissioner C. Chandramouli said.
Adding to the complexity of counting and classifying the world’s second biggest population will be a simultaneous process of collecting biometric data on every person, to be used in a new National Population Register.
“It is also a challenge to see that the 2.5 million enumerators carry out the instructions we have given them without error,” Chandramouli said from his New Delhi office.
Officials will collect fingerprints and photograph every resident for the first time for the register — a process described by Home Minister P. Chidambaram as “the biggest exercise ... since humankind came into existence.”
Along with census details, “personal attributes” will be recorded, such as declared nationality and marital status, and details on the proportion of bank account holders and cellphone users.
The twin census and population register processes will stretch over 11 months, consume 11.63 million tonnes of paper and cost 60 billion rupees (US$1.25 billion).
“India has been conducting national census since 1872,” Chandramouli said. “Nothing — floods, droughts, even wars — has been able to stop it.”
The basic census will start with officials visiting Indian President Pratibha Patil for her signature during the first leg of the process called “houselisting.”
“Enumerators” will then fan out over the country to begin houselisting, which records information on homes, such as the construction material used or the availability of electricity and water.
The physical count of residents will be made between Feb. 9 and Feb. 28 next year and the completed census will be released by the middle of next year.
“The trick is to get things right the first time. There is no question of a re-census,” Chandramouli said.
This time, to minimize the 2.3 percent margin of error recorded in the 2001 census, officials will be armed with satellite maps of India’s 608,786 villages.
“I have instructed enumerators to ensure they reach out to the women, the elderly, the disabled, nomadic communities and migrants — usually left out in the census process,” Chandramouli said.
However, Ashish Bose, a retired professor of Indian and Asian population studies at Delhi University, warned of mistakes creeping in despite the best efforts.
“Uneducated people in villages never know their ages correctly. It is never a ‘51’ its always 50 or 55. But overall we conduct a good census — no doubt about it and the vast majority of people are keen to participate,” he said.
S. Parasuraman, a demography professor at the Tata Institute of the Social Sciences in Mumbai, said the new population registry will provide a valuable database.
“In a disaster for instance, one will be able to pinpoint how many people were living at a place before and after the catastrophe struck. It will be a compilation of useful information enabling proper governance,” he said.
Data collected for the National Population Register will in turn facilitate the issue of the 16-digit Unique Identity Numbers to all Indian residents.
This will serve as a one-stop proof for all Indians to establish their identity, eliminating the current need to produce multiple personal documents.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS