Pictures of us

Come April,when enumerators land up at President Pratibha Patil’s with an exhaustive questionnaire,this country’s decennial exercise in profiling itself would have begun. The registrar general and census commissioner is mandated with ensuring that every single household is visited and a variety of socio-economic indicators drawn for each individual. The scope of the exercise is mind-boggling enough to bear a recap each decade. So,for Census 2011 there shall be more than 21 lakh enumerators spanning across 5,716 tehsils,7,742 towns and 60,876 villages. Together,their efforts will once again pixellate the combined profile of 1.20 billion people.

However,the logistics of the Census often obscure how intrinsically the exercise tests a society’s democratic roots,its capacity to confront a picture of itself. This year the exercise will be deepened by what Home Minister P. Chidambaram calls “the biggest exercise since mankind came into existence”. A National Population Register is to be compiled. So each respondent will have to provide personal details,thereby feeding a database that will be the basis for issuing identity cards to each Indian by the Unique Identification Authority. The National Population Register is a quantum step forward since it gives each respondent an identity — she now has a name and is no longer a statistic.

At a time when many developed countries are moving to sampling instead of elaborate census operations and when many multi-ethic societies prefer to gloss over their complexities,the ferment informing India’s Census is revealing. Take,for instance,the recent debate that caste be a parameter. In the end,the debate settled against the overall utility of the measure. But as Ashish Bose,India’s grand old demographer,told The Sunday Express,there is scope to streamline data collection for quicker dissemination. Perhaps in 2020.