A Patna High Court bench has in recent days stayed the work on the caste survey being carried out by the State of Bihar on the grounds that it amounts to conducting a census that the state government has no power to carry out. The court said prima facie the power to conduct a census under the Census Act, 1948 vests only with the Union government.
The interim order comes as a blow to the Nitish Kumar government which launched its state caste survey on 7 January this year. Having incurred a cost of Rs 115 crore so far, the survey was nearing its end.
Mapping caste demography was for the first time included in the census of 1931. It was a significant decision as caste is an important element in India to track socio-economic changes and population distribution.
It is indeed a piquant situation. The Patna High Court wants the Union government to map the caste numbers. But forget state caste ratios, the Centre for one reason or the other has repeatedly postponed the national decadal census due for release in 2021. Meanwhile, the country is grappling with outdated data based on the 2011 census.
Repeated postponements
It is significant that since the every-10-year ‘decadal’ census exercise was launched in 1881, it has almost never been delayed or postponed until now. The importance of population-related data was underlined with the passage of the Census Act, 1948, which set up the Office of the Registrar General of India (ORGI) under the Home Ministry.
The census process is a massive exercise involving 2-3 million enumerators going house to house filling out personal and family information related to literacy levels, education, housing, household amenities, migration, fertility, language, religion, caste, and so on. Mining this data through individual interviews forms our information repository so crucial to both understanding the needs of our people and for decision-making by the government.
Plans for Census 2021 were first released in 2019 with a humungous budget of Rs 8,754 crore. For the first time, pen-and-paper was to be replaced by digital entries; and data collection was to be carried out in two phases -- first from April to September 2020 and the second in February 2021.
However, with the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, this was postponed indefinitely and 31 December 2022 was identified as the new date for “freezing the boundaries of administrative units” – a euphemism that work could only begin after that date. The start date has been further extended to 1 July, this year; but it is now apparent that nothing is going to move till the completion of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Verified data is the enemy of political bombast. That is why those in power are allergic to scientific data. For instance, the true numbers of OBCs and the fertility rates of religious minorities may puncture the popular myths being peddled by the BJP and other far-right parties. Most of all, the current narrative of economic development might not be matched by the data offered by Census 2021.
‘There is no poverty’
It is the debate on the eradication of poverty that is perhaps the worst impacted due to the lack of scientific data. This is because, for the past decade, India has not released any official poverty numbers. People, therefore, continue to ask: Has poverty significantly declined since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014?
Though poverty measurement stopped in 2011, some auxiliary surveys showed bad news. For instance, leaked data from the 2017/18 National Sample Survey (NSS) showed an unusually high 3.7% decline in real consumption over 6 years. The survey was never released.
Meanwhile, a paper by World Bank researchers estimated extreme poverty in India is higher than previously thought – at 10.2 % in 2019. This was endorsed by Sutirtha Roy and Roy van der Weide who used data from the Consumer Pyramid Household Survey (CPHS) run by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). In summary, they said: Poverty stands at 10.2% in 2019 using the World Bank’s $1.90 per-day-per-capita purchasing power. Further, Urban poverty rose by 2 percentage points during the 2016 demonetization, and rural poverty reduction stalled by 2019, when the economy slowed.
Around the same time, an IMF working paper took the opposite view. It was authored by Surjit Bhalla, the Indian government representative at the IMF, along with co-authors Kara Bhasin and Arvind Virmani. They concentrate on data showing the growth of consumption and add on the impact of government food subsidies to conclude India has essentially eliminated extreme poverty. They also say the pandemic didn’t increase poverty. Rather, “food transfers were instrumental in ensuring that it remained at that low [0.8%] level.”
Anecdotal evidence all around shows there is extreme poverty of an unacceptable level, and that the pandemic has worsened the situation. However, there is a quixotic dilemma: since there is no poverty data, there is no poverty! Perhaps this stance suits those in power, but then pseudo-science cannot replace scientific data. The government needs to extract itself from its ostrich-like position and move ahead with the census 2021.
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