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While Musadkar added, he walked slowly through the narrow alleys of a neighborhood in Mumbai, the most populous city in India, launched a difficult assumption.
“The population is around 6,000 people in this area,” the social worker told CBC News, before his voice left. I was trying to think about how many children live in this section of Govandi, one of the poorest suburbs of Mumbai.
Musadkar does not know with certainty, because India has not made a census since 2011, although the country is supposed to complete a survey that tracks population growth and demographic change every 10 years.
Before 2011, a national census had been held once per decade since 1872.
“When we get the data, we realize how important it is,” said Musadkar, because the census provides essential details as if “this house has a pregnant woman or that house has a mother who breastfered … or a child who is malnourished “.
“If we have the census data, then we can reach (people) in their homes,” said Musadkar, 46, who has been helping residents in low neighborhoods for 18 years.
“We can offer them the services they need.”
In the 14 years since Indian officials celebrated a census for the last time, the country has seen rapid growth, surpassing China as the most populous nation in the world, with 1.44 billion people, according to nations estimates United
A large country as India depends largely on sample surveys to compile data, which is key to boosting government financing and establishing economic figures, inflation numbers and work estimates.
“The quality of the samples gets worse and worse as it is eliminated more, from the (last) census, because the population is growing and people are moving,” said Pronab Sen, economist and former statistical chief of India.
“There is a massive information gap,” he told CBC News.
‘It’s worrying’
The collection of national survey data in 2021 was initially delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sen called this “completely understandable”, but strives to understand why, four years later, the process has not yet begun. Particularly because data collection in all regions of India requires a massive effort, including visits to more than 600,000 villages.
“It’s worrying,” Sen said. “Things are probably falling through cracks at this time,” because 2011 census data is not reliable.
Sen directed the permanent statistics committee of the Indian government until recently, before he dissolved silently. He told CBC News that he and his colleagues in the committee mentioned the lack of updated census data at each meeting, questioning delays in conducting a new survey.
Last September, India Interior Minister Amit Shah declared that his government would begin to carry out the “very soon” census, but there have been no updates since then.
The main party of the opposition Congress has repeatedly pressed to the Narendra Modi government about the lack of census data. The main leader of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi, again raised the issue on Monday, during parliamentary debates on a budget bill.
She said that 140 million Indians were being deprived of their rights to receive help and free grain under a national food security law because the data of the population on which the government is based is very outdated.
Applications for ‘caste census’
The Congress has also requested that the national survey include a “caste census”, which would shed light on how many of the lower castes, as determined by the rigid Hindu social hierarchy system, occupy positions of power or have accumulated wealth.
It is a very political request. Social inequality is extreme in India and has only deepened from the pandemic, with the richest five percent of the Indians who have 60 percent of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam International.
For decades, India has had an affirmative action program to address caste discrimination and help those who are part of the marginalized castes to get ahead. But the need has only been based on estimates.
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India has not had a caste census since 1931, when it was still under British domain, and the specific findings of the caste gathered during the last Census of 2011 were never released.
It has been speculated in newspaper publishers that current census delays are “tactical”, with an opinion piece Suggesting that the Modi government expected to “be expelled from listing population sizes of other backward classes”, the official term in India for disadvantaged communities or lower castes.
Another arguing The delay is a clearly political choice, stating that “if the census had been a priority (the modi government) would have launched it immediately after the pandemic had followed its course in 2021”.
A couple of public policy academics based in Boston, Write in the scientific journal The LancetThe census delay “poses suspicions” concluded and denounced “the recent pattern of the Indian government to ignore or reject unpleasant data provided by international surveys and classifications.”
A gigantic task
To complicate further things is that pandemia led to a massive migration in India, people returning to their villages of the largest cities where they had been working.
“We don’t know where they have gone,” Sen said. “They extend throughout the country and we cannot communicate with them” because the census registration data is very old.
Census enumerators, or Censuswallahs, as they are known locally, will have to close the information gap. But the logistics of data collection is one of the most complex in the world, given the size and population of India.
“We have to train 2.5 million census enumerators,” Sen said. “Finding these 2.5 million people becomes problematic, because they have to be public servants” taken from their regular duties at the state level and local government.
Public officials should be seconded to the operation of the census during the 18 months or so that are needed to track people and compile the data.
“This is a big problem,” Sen said, for local governments.
While economists, academics and others have repeatedly expressed concerns about the lack of a census and what effect has had in India, Sen said there has been little response from officials within the government.
“All ministries, particularly those who are in the business of delivering public welfare functions … should be screaming and shouting” about the lack of updated statistics, Sen said.
“I don’t even listen to that.”
