I laughed when I heard a story about the head of a joint family who could not clearly answer how many members were there in his family. More often than not, he called even his own son by the name of his other son. He even failed to recognise a young member of the joint family.
He had a good memory though. But he just did not care to know and remember the composition of his family. He even pooh-poohed the suggestion of keeping a register to note down the names and other necessary details of every member of the joint family.
The same kind of situation has surfaced because of the delay in conducting the census. It has uninterruptedly been conducted every 10 years from 1881 to 2011. The first phase of this decade’s census was expected to begin on April 1, 2020, but had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But even after the pandemic ended, there has been no sign that the census will start anytime soon.
In the absence of fresh data, government agencies are still formulating policies and allocating subsidies based on the data accrued from the 2011 census. The government estimated that around 81 crore people required food assistance for five more years. However, the 81 crore estimate is based on the 2011 census.
Economists pointed out that more than 10 crore deserving Indians would not get the benefit of the five-year extension because of the government’s failure to conduct the long-due population census.
A government cannot function without updating necessary and detailed data on the population of the country every ten years. It has been a practice for 140 years. The delay hinders the government from taking necessary action; and when action is taken, it has to be without proper planning based on the latest data.
The Women’s Reservation Bill, for instance, was passed in the Parliament in September last year. It provides one-third reservation to women in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies. But it has two strings attached to it. The first one says it will wait for the Census conducted after this bill has been published. Then comes the second string in the form of delimitation. It says that on the basis of that Census report, delimitation will be undertaken to reserve seats for women. To procrastinate in conducting census will further delay the implementation of the bill.
Recently, the Supreme Court passed a verdict allowing sub-classification of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the context of reservation. The Court, in that judgement, has directed the State to collect data on the inadequacy of representation in the services of the State because this is used as an indicator of caste backwardness. This is an important indicator of backwardness, no doubt. However, a caste census can only bring out the real picture of caste backwardness.
Caste hatred and caste nepotism are like fractures in our society. After a suspected fracture, a doctor always takes decisions after doing at least an X-ray. Any action on caste reservation must similarly be taken after collecting necessary data by conducting a caste census.
A caste census will not add to the cost of conducting a census. A caste census can be done only by adding a question or two to the questionnaire for the census.
Now I feel that I laughed hearing that story about the head of a family because I could not empathise with the sufferings of other members of the family. They must have felt great pain when they were not recognised as family members, just like more than 10 crore people of our country who now fail to get the benefit of free ration.