A gigantic miscounting exercise

In nine months from now, the much-awaited and long-delayed Census exercise will have completed a countrywide population enumeration. Beginning 1 October, this will be done first in the western Himalayan regions of Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and cover all other parts of India in February 2027.

The timeline itself raises concerns as do the design and the expected outcomes of the exercise.

First, the timeline. The UN recommends that a decennial Census be carried out in the zero year of a decade and for the data to be made available in the first year of a decade. The recommendation to standardise the year is meant to facilitate international comparisons. All past Census exercises from 1871 to 2011 were unfailingly conducted in the first year of a decade.

If the Covid pandemic thwarted the 2021 Census exercise, it should have been completed in 2023 — and stood as the 2021 Census; alternatively, the exercise should have been postponed to 2030 for 2031. The arbitrary declaration of the Census in 2026, making 1 March 2027 the reference date, disrupts long-established practice, institutionalised for sound statistical reasons.

The government has offered no reasons, and the only logical explanation for this decision seems to be that the Delimitation Act of 2002 and the supplementary Delimitation (Amendment) Act, 2003, lay down that an increase in the number of Members of Parliament may be considered only subsequent to a Census that takes place after 2026. It appears that the government is determined to complete the Census before the 2029 general election.

The responsibility to conduct a Census rests with the Union government as per proviso #69 of the 7th Schedule of the Constitution. The Article provides for a ‘Union List’, and the one word proviso #69 simply says ‘Census’. Clearly, the Union government is all powerful in this matter.

The Census Act, 1948 provides the legal basis for the conduct of Censuses in independent India. Although the Act puts the Union government in charge of the exercise, the state governments provide administrative support in the actual conduct of the Census. The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India is attached to the Union ministry of home affairs, and its decisions cannot be questioned in any court, including the Supreme Court, or even in Parliament.

In effect, too bad if you have reservations about the exercise. For instance, a caste enumeration, which the government had promised it would build into the Census exercise, has taken a shape that will make the enumeration pointless.

The last caste enumeration was in 1931, when the map of India looked very different. This time round, the caste question is in an ‘SC/ST/Other’ format that first segregates SCs and STs, and leaves the ‘Other’ as an open-ended category that the respondent can answer as they please without the assistance of a drop-down menu prompting/framing their choice. The open-ended format, which is no accident, is bound to fetch thousands of caste names, which will be impossible to rationalise and presumably end up as digital trash.

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A worse fate awaits the denotified tribes (DNT) and nomadic communities. These were communities in India that the British colonial government falsely labelled as ‘born criminal’ under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. They were kept confined in soft prisons known as ‘settlements’ and put to harsh, unpaid labour to build roads and railway lines. This meant that every newborn in the community had to carry the stigma of criminality.

More and more communities were corralled into this demeaning description under a series of colonial legislative expansions and amendments, such that, projected on the basis of the 1931 Census, their population in 1991 was estimated around 50 million.

The colonial notifications were withdrawn in the early 1950s (hence ‘denotified tribes’), but while the stigma of ‘born criminal’ was legally withdrawn, the police bias persisted.

The 40-question schedule for Phase 2 (the ‘population enumeration’ phase) of the ongoing Census makes no attempt to update the DNT count. The two-layered caste question will offer them a narrow pathway to first select SC/ST or ‘Other’ and then identify themselves as Nat, Madari, Banjara et al, but it won’t yield a picture of their demographic strength or diversity.

If the number of questions could be increased from 29 in the 2011 Census to 40 now — several of them redundant — surely adding one more question that allowed DNTs to correctly identify themselves would not have increased the enumerators’ burden. Had we bothered to do so, we might have taken the first meaningful step towards reducing the social discrimination that DNTs continue to face.

An even more ticklish issue relates to the data on religion. In my work with Adivasis and nomadic communities, I have often come across families whose members profess adherence to different religions.

In Kalbelia, Madari, Garudi, Bahurupia and Gadiya-lohar families, it is not uncommon for some members of a family to identify themselves as Muslim and some others as Hindus. These bi-religious communities are more common in the border areas of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Kashmir. Likewise among border communities in the Northeast. It is also common for DNT individuals to profess bi-religious identities.

The Census 2027 question on religion compels a respondent to name one or none, which will force a miscounting of all bi-religious or multi-religious individuals.

The Census question on religion betrays abject ignorance of religious practice in India, particularly with regard to the religious preferences of tribal communities. A great wealth of anthropological studies show they do not practise temple- or scripture-based religions. While the total tribal population is still about 9 per cent (approximately 13 crore), they invariably get categorised as Hindu and, in some cases, Christian.

The 2011 Census had reported a total population of 121 crore, including 96.62 crore Hindus, 17.22 crore Muslims, 2.78 crore Christians, 2.08 crore Sikhs, 0.8 crore Buddhists, 0.4 crore Jains and 0.8 crore ‘Others’. Another 28 lakh (or 0.3 crore to round off) did not state a religion. The last two categories add up to a little over 1 crore whereas the tribal population is about 13 crore.

Will all these people be pushed into categories like Hindu or Christian at the whim of the enumerators? Does the constitutionally protected Right to Freedom of Religion (which incidentally covers the right to profess, practise and propagate) still hold meaning?

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In the 2011 Census, 1,369 ‘mother tongues’ as claimed by citizens were grouped under 121 ‘languages’. For a language to be categorised as one, it had to be spoken by at least 10,000 persons — a most unscientific criterion that no serious linguistic theory validates.

Similarly, many large languages were shown as sub-sets of a neighbouring large language: for instance, Bhojpuri, a language claimed by over 5 crore, was shown as a sub-set of Hindi. There were 55 such appropriations with respect to Hindi alone. Why does the Census want to deny citizens their linguistic identity? To doctor these cultural minutiae is to misrepresent the demography.

While avoiding questions that might have yielded a more granular, truer picture of the Indian population (think caste, tribe, language enumeration), Census 2027 burdens the exercise with some redundant questions and some that are downright objectionable.

Why add questions on the number of bank accounts and Aadhaar number and telephone number when the government already has all that data? And what exactly is the point of a question that asks respondents to name their spouse?

Sure, the Census has legal sanction to ask any question but citizens too have individual liberties. Is this data being collected to assess the scale of inter-faith marriages? And what if the data fall into the hands of zealots running hate campaigns against religious minorities?

G.N. Devy is a cultural activist