India has 1.44 billion people, but hasn’t done a census in 14 years. The result is a ‘massive information gap’

As Suman Musadkar walked slowly through the narrow dirt alleyways of a neighbourhood in Mumbai, India’s most populous city, she threw out a rough guess. 

“The population is around 6,000 people in this area,” the social worker told CBC News, before her voice trailed off. She was trying to think of how many children live in this section of Govandi, one of the poorest suburbs of Mumbai.

Musadkar doesn’t know for sure, because India hasn’t conducted a census since 2011, even though the country is supposed to complete a survey tracking population growth and demographic change every 10 years. 

Prior to 2011, a national census had been held once a decade since 1872.

“When we get the data, we realize just how important it is,” Musadkar said, because the census provides nitty-gritty details such as whether “this house has a pregnant woman or that house has a breastfeeding mother … or a child who is malnourished.” 

“If we have the census data, then we can reach [people] in their homes,” said Musadkar, 46, who has been helping residents in the slum for 18 years.

“We can offer them the services they need.”

In the 14 years since Indian officials last held a census, the country has seen rapid growth, overtaking China as the world’s most populous nation, with 1.44 billion people, according to estimates from the United Nations.

A large country like India relies heavily on sample surveys to compile data, which is key to driving government funding and establishing economic figures, inflation numbers and job estimates.

“The quality of the samples gets worse and worse the further removed you are from the [last] census, because the population is growing and people are moving around,” said Pronab Sen, an economist and former chief statistician of India. 

“There’s a massive information gap,” he told CBC News.

‘It’s worrying’

Gathering of national survey data in 2021 was initially delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sen called this “completely understandable,” but is at pains to understand why, four years later, the process still hasn’t begun. Particularly since gathering the data across all of India’s regions requires a massive effort, including visits to more than 600,000 villages.

“It’s worrying,” Sen said. “Things are probably falling through the cracks right now,” because the 2011 census data is unreliable.

Sen led the Indian government’s standing committee on statistics until recently, before it was quietly dissolved. He told CBC News that he and his colleagues on the committee brought up the lack of updated census data at every meeting, questioning the delays in conducting a new survey. 

Last September, India’s Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah stated his government would begin conducting the census “very soon,” but there has been no update since. 

The main opposition Congress Party has repeatedly pressed Narendra Modi’s government on the lack of census data. Senior Congress leader Sonia Gandhi again brought up the issue on Monday, during parliamentary debates on a budget bill. 

She claimed that 140 million Indians were being deprived of their rights to receive aid and free grain under a national food security law because the population data the government relies on is so out-of-date. 

Requests for ‘caste census’

The Congress has also asked for the national survey to include a “caste census,” which would shine a light on how many of the lower castes, as determined by the rigid Hindu social hierarchy system, hold positions of power or have amassed wealth.             

It’s a highly political request. Social inequality is extreme in India and has only deepened since the pandemic, with the richest five per cent of Indians holding 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam International.

For decades, India has had an affirmative action program to tackle caste discrimination and help those who are part of marginalized castes to get ahead. But the need has been based solely on estimates. 

India hasn’t had a caste census since 1931, when it was still under British rule, and the caste-specific findings gathered during the last census in 2011 were never released. 

There has been speculation in newspaper editorials that the current census delays are “tactical,” with one opinion piece suggesting the Modi government hoped to “wriggle out of enumerating the population sizes of Other Backward Classes,” the official term in India for disadvantaged communities or lower castes. 

Another argued the delay is a distinctly political choice, stating that “if the census had been a priority, [the Modi government] would’ve rolled it out immediately after the pandemic had run its course in 2021.” 

A couple of Boston-based public policy academics, writing in the science journal The Lancet, concluded the census delay “raises suspicions” and decried “the Indian government’s recent pattern of ignoring or rejecting unpleasant data provided by international surveys and rankings.”

A mammoth task 

Complicating matters further is that the pandemic led to a massive migration in India — people moving back to their villages from the larger cities where they had been working. 

“We don’t know where they’ve gone,” Sen said. “They’re spread out all over the country and we can’t reach out to them” because the census registration data is so old. 

Census enumerators — or censuswallahs, as they’re known locally — will have to close the information gap. But the logistics of data collection is one of the most complex in the world, given India’s size and population. 

“We have to train 2.5 million census enumerators,” Sen said. “Finding these 2.5 million people becomes problematic, because they have to be public servants” borrowed from their regular duties at the state and local government levels. 

The civil servants would need to be seconded to the census operation for the 18 months or so that it takes to track people down and compile the data. 

“This is a huge issue,” Sen said, for local governments. 

While economists, academics and others have repeatedly raised concerns about the lack of a census and what effect it has had on India, Sen said there has been little response from officials within government. 

“Every ministry, particularly those that are in the business of delivering public welfare functions…. should be yelling and screaming” about the lack of updated statistics, Sen said. 

“I don’t even hear that.”