When Suman Musadkar slowly went through the narrow dirt alleys of a neighborhood in Mumbai, India’s most populous city, she threw out a tough presumption.
“The population is around 6,000 people in this area,” the social worker told CBC News before her vote went on. She tried to think about how many children live in this section of Govandi, one of the poorest suburbs of Mumbai.
Musadkar does not know exactly because India has not carried out no census since 2011, although the country pursues a survey every 10 years that pursues population growth and demographic change.
Before 2011, a national census had taken place once in the decade.
“When we receive the data, we recognize how important it is”. ”
“If we have the census data, we (humans) can reach in their houses,” said the 46 -year -old Musadkar, who has been helping the residents in the slum for 18 years.
“We can offer you the services you need.”
In the 14 years since the United Nations estimates, the country has recorded rapid growth since the United Nations estimates that China, the most populous nation in the world, overtook the most populous nation in the world.
A large country like India is strongly based on sample surveys to create data, which is the key to promoting state financing and to determine economic figures, inflation figures and job estimates.
“The quality of the rehearsals is getting worse, the further they are from the (last) census, since the population grows and people move,” said Pronab sen, economist and former chief statistician in India.
“There is a massive information gap,” he told CBC News.
“It is worrying”
The collection of national survey data in 2021 was initially delayed due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
Sen called this “completely understandable”, but has pain to understand why the process did not start four years later. Especially since collecting the data in all regions of India requires a massive effort, including visits to more than 600,000 villages.
“It is worrying,” said Sen. “Things are probably falling through the cracks at the moment” because the 2011 census data is unreliable.
Sen headed the Indian government’s constant statistics committee until recently before it dissolved quietly. He announced CBC News that he and his colleagues in the committee brought up the lack of updated people’s counting data at every meeting and questioned the delays in the implementation of a new survey.
Last September, India’s Interior Minister Amit Shah stated that his government would conduct the census “very soon”, but since then there has been no update.
The government of Narendra Modi repeatedly pressed the most important opposition congress party on the lack of census data. The senior congress manager Sonia Gandhi once again addressed the topic on Monday during the parliamentary debates about a budget bill.
She claimed that 140 million Indians of her rights, help and free grain were robbed of according to a national nutritional security law, since the population data that the government rely on is so out of date.
Inquiries for “Kaste -Volkschälung”
The congress has also asked the national survey to contain a “Kaste Volksensung” that would shine a light on how many of the lower box, as determined by the rigid Hindu social hierarchy system, has taken up power positions or used wealth .
It is a very political request. Social inequality is extreme in India and has only deepened since the pandemic. According to Oxfam International, the richest five percent of the 60 percent of the country’s 60 percent of the country.
For decades, India has continued to find a positive action program to combat the discrimination against the caste and to support those who are part of marginalized box. However, the need was based exclusively on estimates.
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India has no longer had a caste counting count since 1931 than was still under British rule, and the box-specific results that were collected during the last census in 2011 were never published.
There was speculation in the newspaper editorial offices that the current delays in the census census are “tactical”, an opinion suggested that the government hoped that “the list of the population sizes of other reverse classes”, the official term in India for disadvantaged communities or communities Or underbox.
Another argument that the delay was a significantly political decision that “if the census had been a priority (the modes government) had triggered immediately after pandemic in 2021.”
A couple of academics based in Boston who write in the Science Journal The Lancet concluded the “suspicion” census and condemned “the latest pattern of the Indian government to ignore or reject unpleasant data through international surveys and ranking lists.
A mammoth task
To make matters worse, the pandemic led to a massive migration in India – people who return to their villages from the larger cities in which they had worked.
“We don’t know where they went,” said Sen. “You are distributed across the country and we cannot reach them” because the census registration data are so old.
Census lever or censuswallahs, as they are known locally – must close the information gap. However, the logistics of data acquisition is one of the most complex in the world in view of the size and population of India.
“We have to train 2.5 million censuses,” said Sen. “Finding these 2.5 million people, becomes problematic because they have to be public staff,” borrowed from their regular duties on state and local government.
The officials would have to be lowered the census surgery for the people up to 18 months or something necessary to track down people and create the data.
“This is a big topic,” said sen for local governments.
While economists, academics and others repeatedly expressed concerns about the lack of a census and the effects on India, Sen said that the officials within the government would hardly have a reaction.
“Every ministry, especially those who are able to do the social welfare functions in the business activity … should scream and scream on the lack of updated statistics,” said Sen.
“I don’t even hear that.”
