When a child is born, someone dies or the Prime Minister assumes office, the Department of Home at the Ministry of Home Affairs is kept in the loop. The department issues notification when the new president, ministers, members of Parliament and governors take office. Another key function rests with the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, an office that is growing increasingly crucial to India’s federal government. Statistical insight about the country’s population isn’t just used to set development goals, the government has more information than ever on its citizenry through increasing access to information afforded by the census. In the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, for instance, the National Population Register was used to numerate and verify coastal populations. The Unique Identity Card project

endeavors to improve delivery of government support services. 

The decennial census is a legacy of the British, who ruled India in various incarnations for over three centuries. They began the tradition in 1872 to keep track of the demography of what was then a British dependency. Human resources at their disposal had to be fully tapped for profitable trade and maximizing revenue collection. The census was therefore a priority, and the colonists deployed scholars and those with the appropriate skills for the task. Independent India inherited their methods.

The Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner was set up in 1949 to assess the state of the population with respect to development goals and to better target welfare schemes initiated by the government. In the first post-independence census report, Census Commissioner RA Gopalaswami wrote in 1951, “It is extremely important that the attention of the people should be focused on this factor of improvident maternity…The occurrence of improvident maternity should evoke social disapproval as any other form of social indulgence.” A family planning program was launched the next year to control population growth. Despite the head start, six decades later, the recently released 2011 census has found India’s population to be 1.21 billion, almost closing the gap with China, the world’s most populous country at 1.34 billion. (Though, it should be noted, India has less than half of China’s landmass.) In 1969, through an appropriately titled act, the Office was also tasked with registering births and deaths.

The Health Survey and Development Committee, known as the Bhore Committee, constituted in the post-war 1940s, recommended that the “population problem should be the subject of continuous study.” And so it has been ever since the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner took charge. Apart from the decennial census, it has constantly churned out figures from ethnographic studies and surveys of infrastructure and amenities in villages and towns. Even after the registration of births and deaths was made mandatory in 1969, the office has been conducting sample surveys of the same through part-time and full-time enumerators. All these studies have been used to gauge the impact of previous and current five-year plans of the government and to incorporate changes in the future plans.

Autonomous Bodies

The latest decennial census began on April 1, 2010 and the first results were released in March 2011. Around 1.21 billion people, including the numerous homeless, were counted and such varied information recorded as computer and mobile phone ownership, Internet use and access to clean drinking water.

“It is for the first time in human history that an attempt is being made to identify, count, enumerate and record and eventually issue an identity card to 1.2 billion people,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram said at the start of the census. The recently formed Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) under the chairmanship of Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of the Bangalore-based software giant Infosys, will issue biometric identity cards to all citizens. An initiative of the Planning Commission, the IT project, because of its sheer scale, is one of the world’s most ambitious.

The 2011 census, which had some 2.7 million officials visiting households in about 7,000 towns and 600,000 villages over 11 months, cost around Rs. 22 billion. According to Nandan Nilekani, each of the unique identity (aadhaar) numbers will cost Rs. 100 to generate. The Office of the Registrar General also conducts annual surveys and computes key population markers such as birth and death rates, infant and maternal mortality rates and sex ratio at birth. Under the Sample Registration System, surveys have been carried out since the late 60s of samples that are revised every 10 years. More recently, the Annual Health Survey was launched to gauge the impact of government schemes like the National Rural Health Mission; it covers a population of 18 million across eight states and said to be the largest demographic survey in the world.

UIDAI’s Tall Claims

UIDAI’s unique identity card project has been conceived to cut through the red tape and improve delivery of government services. However, it has its origins in a national security project that received the approval of the Parliament with the amendment of the Citizenship Act in 2003. The amendment authorizes the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner to “compulsorily register every Indian citizen,” issue identity cards and maintain the National Population Register. Such a register is being prepared for the thousands of coastal villages nationwide as part of an effort to secure maritime borders in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Wary of UIDAI’s roots, human rights activists have questioned the government’s attempt at increased surveillance of its citizens. Concerns have also been raised over whether the government will be able to protect such a vast database from hackers.

Among justifications for such a gigantic project have been to plug leakages due to identity fraud in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA), the ruling United Progressive Alliance’s flagship welfare program that guarantees one hundred days per year of  Rs.100 per day employment to a rural households, as well as to provide the needy better access to the Public Distribution System (PDS). But experts such as Reetika Khera choose to differ: Identity fraud, she and others have argued, has nearly been wiped out under the present system and what PDS needs is not a technological advancement in delivery but an increase in geographic coverage and clearer classification of what constitutes a deserving beneficiary. A project similar to UIDAI failed to take off in the UK because of the costs of implementation. Despite several demands, activists charge, the authority has yet to make public a cost-benefit analysis.

JK Banthia’s Blunder

In 2004, then-Census Commissioner JK Banthia held a press conference to present population figures of religious communities obtained from the 2001 census. The press release noted that India’s Muslim population had increased by 36% between 1991 and 2001, up from 32.9% during 1981-91. This wasn’t exactly accurate. Due to an insurgency raging in the majority Muslim state of Jammu & Kashmir, it was impossible to conduct the 1991 census. Even though Banthia clearly explained the discrepancy, it made the news the next day. Three days later, the figure was revised to a ten-year growth rate of 29.3%. This actually meant the sharpest ever drop in the community’s growth, which was in fact a greater drop than for Hindus, who comprise the overwhelming majority of India’s population. A few social scientists defended him calling it a goof-up and Banthia himself said he would be “the last person to link religion with population.” But the media played it up, briefly unsettling the “secular” United Progressive Alliance government, which had come to power a few months earlier defeating a Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance. Muslim leaders accused Banthia, who was appointed by the NDA regime, of fudging figures to create hysteria about a skyrocketing Muslim population and asked for his dismissal. Then Home Minister Shivraj Patil ordered a probe into the incident. Banthia’s tenure, though, came to an end a month later and he returned to his home cadre in Maharashtra.

When the provisional results of the 2011 census were released in March 2011, a breakdown showed 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six, compared with 927 in the last census. The Census Commissioner C. Chandramouli said at the time that it was “a matter of grave concern.” The then Home Secretary GK Pillai admitted that “whatever measures that have been put in over the last 40 years has not had any impact on child sex ratio and therefore that requires a complete review.”

Several initiatives have been launched over the years to protect girl children but female infanticide is still common in the country. While the programs are usually meant for the rural poor, prenatal sex selection is actually most common among the middle-class population in towns and cities with access to cheap ultrasound scans. The Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act, (1994) has been amended to prevent misuse of prenatal diagnostic techniques but its implementation leaves much to be desired.

At the heart of the problem, though, is the status of women in society, who have traditionally held limited property and land rights, and the traditional dowry system at the time of marriage, in which the bride’s family has to pay the bridegroom in cash or kind. 

When the 2011 census got under way in April 2010, many parliamentarians, especially those from traditionally disadvantaged castes, demanded that a question on caste be included in the questionnaire. The government eventually relented, despite opposition to the move from some of the ruling Congress MPs and members of the Union Cabinet. The Home Ministry also argued that it would be a difficult to classify people this way. There is a lack of uniformity in sub-caste classifications across different states and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for enumerators to verify claims of membership to a specific community. The Union Cabinet decided to hold a separate caste census from June to December 2011. The supporters of the move argued that since affirmative action programs are aimed at people from the historically disadvantaged castes, a caste census would count the number of beneficiaries of these programs and help the government focus on the neediest among them.

DK Sikri was the Registrar General and Census Commissioner from 2004-2009. The preparations for the 2011 census began in 2007, with Sikri at the helm. He is now the secretary at the Ministry of Women & Child Development.