While Suman Musadkar walked slowly through the narrow alleys of a district in Mumbai, the most populous city in India, it threw a rough assumption.
“The population is around 6,000 people in this area,” the social worker told CBC News before his voice moved away. She was trying to think of how many children live in this section of Govandi, one of the poorest suburbs of Mumbai.
Musadkar does not know it with certainty, because India has not carried out a census since 2011, even if the country is supposed to carry out a survey which follows demographic growth and demographic change every 10 years.
Before 2011, a national census had taken place once a decade since 1872.
“When we get the data, we realize how important it is,” said Musadkar, because the census provides malnutrated nitty-grille details. “”
“If we have the census data, then we can reach [people] In their homes, “said Musadkar, 46, who has had residents in the slum for 18 years.
“We can offer them the services they need.”
During the 14 years which followed an inventory of Indian officials, the country has experienced rapid growth, exceeding China as the most populated nation in the world, with 1.44 billion people, according to the United Nations estimates.
A large country like India is strongly based on sample surveys to compile data, which is essential to stimulate government financing and establish economic figures, inflation figures and employment estimates .
“The quality of the samples becomes more and more stuffed, the more you are removed [last] Census, because the population is developing and people move, “said Pronab Sen, an economist and former chief statistician of India.
“There is a huge information gap,” he told CBC News.
‘It’s worrying’
The collection of national survey data in 2021 was initially delayed due to the Pandemic COVID-19.
Sen called it “completely understandable”, but he leads to understand why, four years later, the process has still not started. Especially since the collection of data in all regions of India requires massive effort, including visits to more than 600,000 villages.
“It’s worrying,” said Sen. “Things are likely to fall through the meshes of the net” because the data from the 2011 census is not reliable.
Sen has managed the Indian government’s permanent committee on statistics until recently, before it was quietly dissolved. He told CBC News that he and his colleagues from the Committee had raised the lack of census data updated at each meeting, questioning the delays in carrying out a new investigation.
Last September, the Indian Minister of Internal Affairs, Amit Shah, said that his government would begin to make the census “very soon”, but there has not been an update since.
The main party of the opposition congress has repeatedly included the government of Narendra Modi on the lack of census data. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi again raised the issue on Monday, during parliamentary debates on a budget bill.
She said that 140 million Indians were deprived of their rights to receive aid and free cereals under national food security law because the population data on which the government is based is thus obsolete.
Requests for “caste census”
The Congress also asked the national survey to include a “caste census”, which would highlight the number of lower castes, as determined by the rigid Hindu social hierarchy system, hold positions of power or have amassed wealth.
It is a highly political demand. Social inequality is extreme in India and is only improving from the pandemic, the five percent richest of Indians holding 60% of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam International.
For decades, India has a positive action program to combat caste discrimination and help those who are part of marginalized castes to move forward. But the need was based solely on estimates.
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India has not received a caste census since 1931, while it was still under British domination, and the specific conclusions met during the last census in 2011 were never published.
There have been speculation in newspaper editorials according to which current census density are “tactical” with An opinion article suggesting that the Modi government hoped to “die out of the enumeration of the population size of other backward classes”, the official term in India for disadvantaged communities or lower castes.
Another argued Delay is a clearly political choice, declaring that “if the census had been a priority, [the Modi government] I would have unrolled it immediately after the pandemic took its course in 2021. ”
Some public policy academics based in Boston, Writing in the scientific journal The Lancetconcluded that the “raises suspicion” census period and has decried “the recent diagram of the Indian government to ignore or reject the unpleasant data provided by international surveys and rankings”.
A gigantic task
Complicating things in addition is that the pandemic led to a massive migration in India – people who return to their villages in the big cities where they had worked.
“We don’t know where they went,” said Sen. “They are distributed throughout the country and we cannot contact them” because the census registration data is so old.
Census enumerators – or census jail, as they know locally – will have to fill the information gap. But the logistics of data collection is one of the most complex in the world, given the size and population of India.
“We have to train 2.5 million census enumerators,” said Sen. “Finding these 2.5 million people becomes problematic because they must be civil servants” borrowed from their regular functions at the levels of the State and the local government.
Officials should be supported in the census operation for about 18 months to find people and compile the data.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Sen, for local governments.
While economists, academics and others have repeatedly raised concerns about the absence of a census and the effect he had on India, Sen said there was Little response from officials within the government.
“Each ministry, in particular those who are delivering public well-being functions … should shout and shout” on the lack of updated statistics, said Sen.
“I don’t even hear that.”
