Census delay may affect progress of development schemes
The Centre’s recent decisions have sent the already-delayed decadal Census 2021 into a deep freeze. The government issued a notification in March 2019 for conducting the census and issued another in July 2019 for updating the National Population Register and launching the first phase of the census, i.e., house listing and housing census. But, Covid stopped all the work.
Meanwhile, the Registrar General of India wrote to the states and Union Territories, extending the date for freezing the administrative boundaries up to June 30, 2023. This was the third extension. Before every census, the states and Union Territories need to inform the Registrar General about the changes in administrative units such as tehsils, talukas, police stations, villages, towns and districts. Only after freezing these administrative boundaries can the census begin. But the extensions douse all hopes of the exercise being launched in 2023. Little surprise, then, that Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai said in Parliament that due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, “the conduct of Census 2021, updating of National Population Register and the related field activities have been postponed until further orders.”
Opposition parties have demanded that the exercise immediately begin, citing that Covid-19 is over and all is back to normal. It has been pointed out that house listing across the country will take at least a year. After preparing a list of households, the Registrar General begins population enumeration. The postponement of the preparatory work for Census 2021 leaves little doubt that the decadal enumeration will not happen before the 2024 general election.
The census data is critical for the right targeting of health and employment, besides studying poverty, consumption, spending and other patterns. In the absence of the 2021 census, the government has no definitive data about population migration during the pandemic. The Centre’s current targeting of benefits is based on old data that does not give clarity on population change in terms of numbers and location. It must respect the sanctity of the census data, which is the only credible basis for implementing its welfare schemes and programmes.