India risks using 'guesswork' to form policy, with census delayed as election looms

India has held a census every 10 years since 1881, deploying an army of interviewers who fan out across the country, quizzing people about every aspect of their lives from housing and education to family size and income.

But when Covid-19 struck in 2020, the government delayed the survey, noted globally for its statistical rigour. Now all that seems certain is the headcount will not be held before the 2024 general election, which is making it tough to determine everything from India's population size to its number of poor.

"The census is critical. You need basic data about the country for planning and, like any projection exercise, the greater the period over which you're projecting, the less accurate the projection becomes," said Pronab Sen, former chairman of the National Statistical Commission and the first chief statistician of India.

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Taking figures from the last census, which was carried out in 2011, the UN forecast India's 1.4-billion population would overtake China's by the middle of this year. But the Indian government has given no calculation of its own.

There has also been no official poverty update, resulting in at least five estimates of the number of poor based on various figures and methodologies, according to data website IndiaSpend. Those estimates range from 2.5 per cent of the population - 34 million - to 29.5 per cent, or 373 million. In the 2011 census, 269 million people were listed as poor, 21.9 per cent of the population.

Economists are employing "high-frequency data" such as car sales, company earnings, electricity output and steel and cement production as proxies for the census to try to gauge the health of the economy and consumption patterns.

But these numbers are insufficient for government planners to determine economic and social trends and frame policy, analysts say.

For instance, planners need to know how well India is doing in terms of improving its male-female sex ratio, with boys long favoured over girls, boosting literacy rates and analysing how fast economic growth is changing the lives of ordinary Indians.

"We don't know what's happening to the ordinary person, to the average Joe," said Harish Damodaran, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research and Policy Analysis, a New Delhi-based think tank. "Without up-to-date data, policymaking becomes guesswork."

The census supplies granular-level information, allowing government agencies, health planners, political scientists, demographers, economists, sociologists and other professionals to drill down into the most minute details of Indians' lives.

"The Netherlands have done away with their census because it's a small country and every bit of information about the population is registered," Sen said. "In India, a lot of that information isn't recorded so there's simply no replacement for the census."

The census delay is significant because India's economy has suffered a series of jolts in recent years. There was demonetisation in 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government voided most of India's currency to flush out untaxed wealth, the 2017 introduction of a complex goods and services (GST) tax which had teething problems, and the pandemic.

Covid-19 killed at least half a million people in India, according to the government, although the World Health Organization has said it believes the true figure is several million.

The virus sent the economy into a tailspin, pushed millions into poverty, and triggered the largest internal migration since the British split the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. Countless city workers walked home to their villages when the pandemic left them jobless.

"Things will have changed on the ground but without the census we don't know how much they have changed," Damodaran said. "The government has instituted various direct-benefit transfer schemes but without the census, we don't know how effective they've been."

India has built a reputation as a world leader in data-gathering. In the 2011 census, 2.5 million interviewers - mainly teachers and civil servants - visited isolated hamlets, remote forest areas, villages, towns and cities. They posed questions about housing, education, family size, age, gender, marital status, employment, earnings, sanitation and other topics.

"The census is a form of validation of whether government programmes are reaching their targets," Sen said. "We do know, for instance, how many kids are enrolled in schools thanks to school enrolment registers which are good. But what we don't know with any certainty is how many kids are out of the school system."

The census results provide government officials with primary data to decide where to build schools, health facilities and other infrastructure as well as where to allocate funds for essential food programmes, jobs and other social welfare schemes.

Household Consumer Expenditure surveys were an important adjunct to the census. They provided in-depth data on food and non-food consumption and were a key measure of poverty and inequality, carried out every five years. The government last did such a survey in 2017-2018, but scrapped the findings due to what it said were "data quality issues".

"We have a situation where claims and counterclaims are being made on how much poverty has reduced or risen in the last decade without any real consumption data," Damodaran said.

Government officials have said they are working on fine-tuning the logistics of what will be India's first digital census. Answers will be registered online, speeding up data-gathering and making the process cheaper and more efficient. As far as timing goes, the home ministry said in a statement in February that the census had been "postponed until further orders".

While a number of countries postponed censuses due to Covid-19, the US, Britain and China still did them during the pandemic. In India, opposition politicians have suggested the delay is because the government fears the findings - especially those related to unemployment and income - before the general election might become a political football.

"The government has preferred to cloak [hide] critical data," said Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera. The government has dismissed the claims as baseless.

Some observers believe there will not be a census until 2025 or even 2026.

"It seems clear they will only do the census exercise after the election," said political author and commentator Parsa Venkateshwar Rao, who noted the preparations required for holding the headcount were lengthy and that time was running out.

"It might be in 2026 so that instead of it being a decennial or 10-yearly census, it could be called a 'quindecennial' census - a 15-year census," said a government official who asked to remain unnamed.

Now, though, the census has been caught up in more controversy that could mean further delays. Opposition leaders are clamouring for a caste count to be included, saying it would be a "pro-poor" move that would highlight economic injustices faced by lower castes.

Underlying the opposition's demands, analysts suggest, may be other motives - hopes that a "caste awakening" might hurt the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's drive to unite different castes under its Hindu nationalist agenda. The government, meanwhile, opposes the call "as a matter of policy".

Analysts say the government fears a hardening of caste identities and an airing of economic grievances could lead to caste enmity and cause the Hindu vote to fragment.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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