Census postponed again, to be delayed till at least October next year

Subject: Polity

Section: National Body

Context:

The deadline to freeze the administrative boundaries of districts, tehsils, towns, municipal bodies and others for the Census has been extended till June 30, 2024.
This means the decennial exercise, which should have started in 2020, will now be postponed again till at least October 2024,as it usually takes about three months to prepare the list of enumerators after setting the boundaries.

Need of Freezing Administrative Boundaries:

Before every Census, states are required to provide information on changes in the number of notified districts, villages, towns and other administrative units such as tehsils, talukas and police stations to the Registrar General of India (RGI).
Freezing of boundary limits of administrative units, at least three months prior, thus is a prerequisite for conducting the census, to prevent State governments’ tendency to create new districts and tehsils or reorganise existing ones.
If changes in administration boundaries happen during a Census, there would be chaos in the field over supervision of such areas. This could lead to some areas being left out of the Census.
The house-listing operations were traditionally taken up in various States at different points of time between March and September of the year prior to the Census.
As a result, the government may have decided to freeze administrative boundaries to coincide with house-listing operations, thereby shortening the time between the freezing of boundaries and the actual Census enumeration.

About Census

The Census is the enumeration of the population of the country and it is being conducted at an interval of 10 years by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
In the Census, data is collected on demographic and various socio-economic parameters like education, language, marriage, fertility, disability, occupation and migration of the individuals.
It was first started under British Viceroy Lord Mayo in 1872 and the first systematic census in India was held in 1881.
The Census 2021 will be the 15th Census and will be conducted in two phases, i.e., house listing and population enumeration.
It will also provide a facility to the public for self-enumeration and for the first time, the exercise will use Mobile App for data collection.
In addition to allowing online self-enumeration, enumerators will continue home visits to collect census data as in the past.

Significance of Census

The Census provides population data and characteristics, housing and amenities for every village and town.
It helps in framing government programs to uplift vulnerable sections and it is used to validate or reject estimates of various sample surveys.
The Census data are used to determine the number of seats to be reserved for SCs, STs in Parliament and State legislatures and delimitation of constituencies.
In case of panchayats and municipal bodies, reservation of seats for SCs and STs is based on their proportion in the population. Other than the Census, there is no other source that can provide this information.
It is also the basis for reviewing the country’s progress in the past decade, monitoring the ongoing schemes of the government and planning for the future.