Sensus And Sensibility

Women who make golgappa and chat papri at home for sale and those who stitch on saree falls for a small fee are also part of India's workforce. Daughters are no less than sons, so how many of them are in the family is a query that takes precedence over how many sons it has. Not just a cursory account of illiterates and literates, but detailed educational qualifications of citizens are to be recorded to enable the country's manpower planning. Disabled citizens count, therefore, they must be counted. The 'head of the family' is not necessarily one of its male members but is anyone who takes most decisions...

The Great Indian Headcount is on, under heads which are refreshingly new. A user-friendly, gender-sensitive questionnaire is doing the rounds of over 152 million households to count a billion Indian people and map the changes in their lives in twentieth century's last decade. Carrying out a 19-day census in the world's largest democracy are 20 lakh enumerators, trudging through every city, town, village and hamlet in India with 23 questions in their bags—some of which never asked before.

These ambitious new queries are designed as much to assess the needs of modern-day India as they are to show up the invisible, and the forgotten among our people. Ergo, questions ranging from mode of travel and distance to workplace, to those pertaining to the disabled members in one's families find new mention in Census 2001.

But there are some reservations about expanding the original brief of a census: a faithful headcount of the population. "Yes, they've been brave introducing many new questions this time around. But I do believe that a task of such mammoth proportions should remain as basic and simple as possible," says demographer Ashish Bose, "Too many questions only complicate matters and should be left for smaller surveys. A lot of bogus data might get collected." Saraswati Raju, professor of social geography at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, voices similar sentiments: "A census is as good as its responses are. Public awareness of the census is anyway low. Include demands for new information, however forward-looking in their purpose, and they usually make people suspicious, tight-lipped."

These experts, however, drop their advocacy of caution when they encounter the enlisting of the country's disabled for the first time in the Indian census' 129-year-old history. Yet another largely unacknowledged segment, our woman workforce, is being counted with much enthusiasm. Four pages of illustrations detailing all the 'unaccounted' work they do finds rightful place in the enumerators' instruction manual. Added to this is an innovative emphasis on recording part-time work, work in family firms/enterprises and 'other economic activities', which aims to quantify hitherto 'invisible' female labour. Further, all literature pertaining to the headcount has 'daughters' printed before 'sons'. Anecdotal evidence from enumerators already records respondents commenting on the enhanced prestige of their 'betis'. This, even as another new statistic intending to add value to policies on the women's reproductive health is being sought out for the first time. New data on the age of marriage for men being collected this census hopes to decipher fertility patterns, compatibility criteria and information tools to help plan for the welfare of the Indian family.

The family's changing lifestyle, meanwhile, is going to be gauged by a series of questions regarding specifics about educational qualification and how far its members have to travel to work. "On the basic level, such statistics help urban planning and structuring of employment schemes better. At yet another level, cross-interpretation of this data might throw up significant facts about how intense the issue of rural unemployment is, even linkages between, say for example, how more educated women travel farther to work," explains Raju. Hoping for this kind of spin-off data, Anjali Nayyar of the Population Council says these new numbers could help in deciphering connections between disability and environment, migratory patterns and the spread of hiv/aids, reproductive behaviour and literacy levels. Says she: "These could provide substantial statistical inputs while drafting policies and formulating advocacy tools."

Indeed, coupled with the new information that has already been collected in the 'houselisting operations' that preceded the census by about nine months, a whole array of statistics will now be available to measure what modern-day living means in India. Unlike its earlier counterparts that drew benchmarks for basic human amenities, the houselist schedule this time around sought new indicators to measure quality of life. Among the nine new questions it asked were specifics regarding water sources for each household; television sets, radios, telephone connections; ownership of vehicles; the number of married couples with independent bedrooms; and banking access.

"We have attempted to make the census as sociologically relevant as possible," says Jayant Kumar Banthia, registrar general and census commissioner of India. Stressing on the painstaking detailing that has gone into formating the questionnaire, Banthia points out a little box at its end that seeks the respondent's particulars and signature: "Even this will tell us something. Who speaks for the family, more men or women. So if the next census shows more women respondents, then that too will be a pointer to women's empowerment."

But sometimes the best of intentions are not good enough, particularly in the absence of able implementation. Many who have faced the enumerators allege that they are in a clumsy rush to finish with the job and are generally disinterested. When single Delhi-based public relations manager Amrita Sengupta told an enumerator that she shared a flat with an unmarried friend, an embarrassed enumerator avoided any further questions and left. Chennai-born advertising professional Ravi Venkataraman was asked by another headcounter whether his birthplace was located in West Bengal. People have also found many enumerators ignorant and insensitive while asking questions. Mostly full-time government school teachers saddled with this side assignment, the enumerators crib about the travails of having to perform a task they are so ill-prepared for. "I've had people refusing to tell me how many sons they have saying 'Nazar lag jayegi' (I'll cast an evil eye on them)," protests Renu Kumar, a teacher who has the difficult task of counting villagers in Pasonda village in Ghaziabad. With not more than six hours of training, she barely manages to cope with the aggression that she meets with when she asks people how many dead children they've had."Women don't come out and men don't care. The majority don't know and don't want to know about the census. They ask why the government is so interested in counting them and their children suddenly?" Because they are the critical numbers in the arithmetic of welfare.