Finally, the Indian government appears to be veering around to the fact that it can’t delay India’s Census any longer. According to reports, it plans to begin conducting the long-delayed population count in September.
The last census was held in 2011 and the next one was due in 2021.
The Narendra Modi government’s excuse for the delay – the COVID-19 pandemic – was never convincing. If the census had been a priority, they would’ve rolled it out immediately after the pandemic had run its course in 2021. An exercise of such scale should have been a decade in the making anyway, well before COVID-19 struck in 2019-20, and ready to roll soon after the pandemic passed.
Going by reports, if the census starts in 2024, figures may be out only as late as 2026, or worse, 2027. That will be 16 years with outdated data on nearly a fifth of the world’s people, and over two-thirds of those in South Asia. Demographers and policy planners have been crying hoarse that decisions concerning 1.4 billion people shouldn’t draw on data that is over 10 years old.
Why is that disastrous for a democracy?
According to Amy Kapcynski, professor of Law at Yale School, “Data are not something merely wielded by democratic governments, but also something that constitutes them. Data are not simply used by democracies but play a formative role in shaping and creating the demos, the ‘we the people’ who are supposed to rule.”
So why has the Modi government finally decided to begin the population count? It’s unlikely, as is widely believed, that the government is bowing to pressure from civil society.
It’s more likely that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s plan to use the delimitation of electoral boundaries (due by 2026) to suit its Hindutva supporters is forcing its hand on the census. There’s also the matter of wanting to increase the population of those beholden to it, via largely divisive population interventions such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), before either the census or delimitation exercises kick in.
It’s also likely that the government is set on delaying something else – the Women’s Reservation Bill, meant to set aside a third of parliamentary and state assembly seats for women. Troublingly for the BJP-led government, the bill is the brainchild of former Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Having tied the bill to the census and delimitation timelines, the government may want to do one of two things: keep kicking that football into the long grass as it’s been doing for the last ten years, or claim credit for it, but on its own terms, when most seats for women will be in what BJP considers electoral strongholds.
Either way, sudden haste on the census appears political, not economic.
Yes, the census is a statistical exercise, but following newfound politicization India’s reputation for statistics has taken a beating. It’s why a new breed of fact-checkers has emerged, compelled to perform a public service that would’ve been largely redundant had official facts and figures been sacrosanct.
Fact-checkers confirm that over the past decade or so, 35 parliamentary questions demanded data on health, education, labor, environment, agriculture, finance, gender, law, and justice. That’s Members of Parliament quizzing the elected government on behalf of their constituents, the people of India. The most frequent reason for not answering at least 17 out of those 35 questions? “No such data is maintained.”
Why are parliamentary questions significant? Why is this habitual opacity troublesome? India’s scale.
Ten years ago, India’s largest five parliamentary seats held a population about the size of the Philippines. Today that’d be closer to the size of Japan. Now, imagine a country with nearly 550 of those mammoth constituencies, quizzing its elected government only to be told half the time that “no such data is maintained.” Or worse, being told half-truths or lies.
India needs a census, but an honest, truthful, and visionary census even more. The government has done little so far to demonstrate that processes around the census’ assumptions, objectives, methodology, collection, compilation, and publication are consultative or scientifically transparent, tested, and rigorous.
So, there’s little to suggest that its findings, as late as 2027, will improve the decisions of those funding India’s development: Indian individual and institutional taxpayers and international institutional funders and donors.
The thing is that while India is being credited with becoming richer, it has reduced its funding to international efforts, while international agencies have increased their funding to India. That’s entitlement, not accountability. What’s the point of a census if it can’t help measure whether a government is supporting its own development as it must?
The World Bank’s commitments to India are well over $21 billion, supporting the very sectors that figure frequently in so many anxious parliamentary questions. But how to be sure that India is making “remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty” if there’s no clarity on what counts as progress? And no clarity on what counts as poverty, let alone extreme poverty?
As many as 26 U.N. organizations in India support sectors that feature regularly in parliamentary questions about growing equality/inequality. But how to be sure about India’s development, if it isn’t demonstrably sustainable?
Outcomes Must Matter More than Outputs
National Geographic has an explainer on a census. The “what” is simple enough. It’s the “why” that’s meaningful. A census is supposed to help governments improve “planning,” achieve “better results,” and “help political leaders and citizens improve the places in which we live, work and play.” Globally, that’s code for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Development isn’t quite development if it isn’t also sustainable. But for it to be anything at all it must be measured first.
Frankly, with the amount of data that the Indian government extracts from citizens (ration cards, voter IDs, passports, Aadhaar cards, PAN cards) most of the straightforward demographic information required ought to be updated in real-time, if not annually, anyway. If the government’s Digital India campaign was substance rather than style, why not? That ought to leave a once-in-a-decade census operations enough bandwidth to focus on more meaningful data.
An honest, forward-looking census is, therefore, an opportunity to capture more than it has historically. There comes a point when development needs to be measured more by outcomes than outputs: are socioeconomic equalities and freedoms, including financial freedoms, increasing or decreasing? A visionary census can help policymakers better understand the people on whose behalf they’re making and remaking policy.
Are the savings of individuals debt-free real savings, or merely absolute savings built on otherwise crippling mortgages and lifelong, inter-generational loans?
What’s the point of knowing whether someone is employed, what their wages are, and whether they serve the agriculture, manufacturing, or services sectors, without also understanding whether their purchasing power is rising, stagnating, or falling? Are they able to comfortably cover themselves and their families with adequate health and life insurance? Is the services sector indeed better than manufacturing, and both better than agriculture?
Of what use is a spike in literacy, school/college enrollment, or expansions in teacher corps, if students aren’t educated, let alone employable or entrepreneurship-worthy?
Are more hospitals, beds, and doctors, a sign of growing health and better nutrition or a lack of it? Is greater access to, or provision of, healthcare a sign of greater health or merely greater demand for disease management, and therefore a sign of poorer health? Are measures such as Infant/Maternal Mortality Rate and Life Expectancy nuanced enough to be useful any longer, or do they need to be replaced with newer measures of health and well-being?
Isn’t the mere provision of a water pipeline and tap pointless, if supply is irregular, rare, or unclean and likely to infect or kill? After all, India’s wastewater is discharged into water bodies in 118 cities and into rivers in 41 cities.
Urbanization is presumed to be a measure of development. But is it, if those living in urban centers are more indebted, more sickly, and more vulnerable to disease and suicide? Or death because of water and air pollution? How much of India’s climate change that sucks up adaptation-mitigation funding is self-inflicted and can be better managed?
Isn’t the mere provision of a toilet futile if it’s unusable? Isn’t the mere provision of electricity counter-productive if the quality is so poor that frequent cuts or fluctuations ruin a household’s electrical appliances?
After such an inexcusable delay, is business-as-usual good enough for India’s census?
Will funders of India’s development, at home and abroad, demand more of India’s census before it’s inflicted upon them? Will pre-census preparation and the end-to-end process involve consultation drawing on the best cross-sector minds from India and abroad?
If designed and run with ambition, creativity, vision, integrity, transparency, professionalism, and competence, a census has the potential to transform decision-making, India’s decisions about its people, and the world’s decisions about India. Sadly, what accompanies the very idea of a census is still too much anxiety, too little anticipation. Also sadly, India and the world deserve better.